Memory, Genre, and Self-Narrativization;
Or, Why I Should Be a More Content Horror Fan
—David Church
243

co n Tr i b u TorS

247

i n d ex

Introduction
They Don’t Make ’Em Like They Used To
On the Rhetoric of Crisis and the Current State of American Horror Cinema

—Steffen Hantke

A D e c a d e o f Am e r i c a n H o r r o r F i l m: T h e P e ss i m i st ’s V i e w
Even though the horror genre has been fed by tributaries from many
national literary traditions—from German Romanticism to French surrealism and
South American magical realism—and even though horror cinema has prospered
and developed its unique forms of expression in many film industries around the
globe, it is in the United States and in the American film industry that horror, for
as long as cinema itself has existed, has been a staple genre, a consistently profitable endeavor, an audience favorite, and a richly diverse form of artistic expression for writers and directors. More than any other film industry around the world,
Hollywood—aided by intrepid and independently minded filmmakers around and
beyond its margins—has created horror films that have come to define the genre. Its
cinematic reinventions of characters from outside its own national culture—think
of Dracula, courtesy of Bela Lugosi, or Frankenstein’s creature, brought to you by
Boris Karloff—have supplanted their respective originals in the collective pool of
pop-culture images. Up to the present day, horror film directors from around the
world tend to end up—sooner or later in their careers, and either by choice or by
economic necessity—on the American shores. For fans and critics of horror film,
America looms large, a touchstone of the genre at its finest.
Ask fans, however, and they will tell you that American horror film in the last
decade—from roughly the mid-1990s, through the turn of the century, and far into
the first decade of the new millennium—has fallen into a slump. While horror film
is doing just fine elsewhere, American horror film is in crisis. Not that no more
horror films are being made; on the contrary, as far as popularity and profitability
go, the American horror film seems near the top of its game as Hollywood lavishes a steady stream of horror films upon its audience. With the exception of a few
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Introduction

high-profile films of blockbuster proportion—one might think of the Will Smith
vehicle I am Legend in 2007 or the films in the Resident Evil, Underworld, and Blade
franchises—most of these films operate at mid-level budgets. They tend to perform
below the top-fifty grossing films of each year but are reliably recouping their moderate production costs in foreign markets and through ancillary release via cable and
DVD sales and rentals.1 These films never fail to find an audience, but most of them
just aren’t any good—or so popular opinion has it. Apparently, even those who go to
see them are not heading out to the Cineplex every weekend with high expectations.
There is a sense of fatigue or outright dissatisfaction with Hollywood horror these
days. Who is doing the complaining? And what exactly are the complaints? Do they
have any substance? And even if they don’t, what do they mean?
From a pessimist’s point of view, the last ten years have seen American horror film at its worst. As one subgeneric cycle followed another with ever-increasing
rapidity, the genre on the whole was in decline. When exactly this slump began
is a matter of opinion. The Wikipedia entry on horror film, which, while noting
recent developments in the genre past 2005, pinpoints the “start of the 2000s” as
the moment that “saw the horror genre going into a slump as movies dealing with
the supernatural had mild but not memorable success” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hor
ror_film).2 The critic David Church reaches back even further, opening his survey of American horror film since The Silence of the Lambs with this statement: “As
the 1980s came to a close, the American horror film seemed locked into an endless
loop of formulaic repetition,” sounding a note of skepticism that would reverberate for many fans into the 1990s with its predominant subgenre of horror, the socalled neo-slasher (Offscreen.com 2006). Successful with mainstream audiences
but received with apprehension by fans and critics, Wes Craven’s Scream, released
in 1996, was—depending on who you asked—either the best or the worst thing
to happen to American horror film. According to the critical voices, Scream’s recycling of “classic” precursors transformed the more politically attuned horror film of
the previous generation into self-indulgent postmodern play. Calling it “more of a
parody than a complicated critique of banal horror formulas,” Church blames the
film for inspiring a host of “slick, teen-oriented horror films (many featuring young
TV stars) with far less imagination and self-reflexive awareness” and serving “as an
unlikely conduit for the recycling of those formulas for a new generation during the
late-1990s and beyond” (Offscreen.com 2006). Even the popularity of horror film in
the wake of Scream turned out to be a mixed blessing. “On the web,” Mark Jancovich
points out, “one can find a wealth of fan materials that discuss the film, and while
some are clearly positive, others are more guarded and even outright hostile. The
guarded responses [. . .] are also clearly troubled by the film’s commercial success”
( Jancovich, “A Real Shocker” 475).
If guardedness and outright hostility weren’t bad enough, fans were even less
thrilled with what came after the neo-slasher. The abandonment of original scripts

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began with a mindless series of remakes, starting with Joel Silver’s and Robert
Zemeckis’s production company Dark Castle and its remakes of gimmicky William Castle films from the 1950s and 1960s, most of which had never been remade
because nobody had ever thought them good enough to deserve a remake. Then
came the indiscriminate plunder of Asian horror films—a practice that, as it confirmed the vitality, creativity, relevance, and intensity of horror film in other countries, made the lack of these qualities strikingly obvious in American cinema. The
cycle started with remakes of Japanese horror ( J-horror) films and then diversified
moderately with remakes of films from such countries as South Korea, Hong Kong,
and Thailand.
The motivation for this practice seems, at first glance, to derive from the
assumption that, as Terence Rafferty put it in a review of the Hollywood remake of
Danny and Oxide Pang’s The Eye, “horror is by its nature a good deal friendlier to
cross-cultural transplantation than most movie genres, because fear is universal in a
way that, say, a sense of humor is not: what we dread is far less socially determined
than what we laugh at” (New York Times, January 27, 2008). Having given Hollywood the benefit of the doubt, Rafferty then goes on, however, to eviscerate most of
the remade Asian horror films: “‘The Eye’ and ‘One Missed Call’ aren’t the worst of
the J-horror remakes,” he writes, “that distinction would go to Jim Sonzero’s witless
‘Pulse’ (2006), which treats its source, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s great 2001 horror poem
‘Kairo,’ as if it were a dirty limerick.” In the final instance, Rafferty concludes that
remakes seem to thrive especially when coupled with horror film because of what he
calls “the traditional shamelessness of the horror genre.”
On the occasion of the release of the Hollywood remakes of, respectively, the
Pang Brothers’ The Eye and Takeshi Miike’s One Missed Call, another reviewer—
Joe Queenan, writing for the Manchester Guardian—reiterates the complaints Rafferty and other reviewers have voiced about the cycle of J-horror remakes. Though
Queenan concedes to Gore Verbinsky’s The Ring the status of having been “the only
American reworking of an Asian horror film that even vaguely approaches the quality of the original” (Guardian, February 22, 2008), he has nothing positive to say
about the rest of the Asian horror film remakes. “Dark Water, starring Jennifer Connelly, is a dud,” he complains, “as is Pulse, while the two American remakes of Ju-on:
The Grudge are no more than passable.”3 Where Rafferty sees the horror film as a
genre amenable to “cross-cultural transplantation,” Queenan, after laying some of
the blame for the failure of these films on individual directors, comes to the conclusion that, in fact, the opposite is true:
the Japanese and Chinese and Korean directors who make these movies not
only know what they are doing but truly enjoy working in the genre, while
the American directors assigned to do the remakes are lazybones, pouters
or clods who are merely phoning in work-for-hire [. . .] certain elements of

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Asian horror—water, hair, the trauma of secondary school, ghosts, and most
especially creepy little girls—do not resonate in the west in quite the same
way they do in the east [. . .]. It may well be that western directors are trying
to shoehorn Asian films into a culture that cannot fully accommodate them
[. . .]. Perhaps this is why remakes of Asian horror movies tend to be mildly
profitable enterprises that few adults talk about—serious critics hate them—
while in Japan, horror movies seem to be taken seriously [. . .]. Since remakes
of Asian horror movies are not terribly expensive to produce, and since there
are dozens of these pictures waiting to be repackaged, we can expect to see
many more films in this genre. (Guardian, February 22, 2008)
While Rafferty and Queenan disagree about the question of how easily, or
whether at all, horror films translate from one culture to another, both agree on the
artistic failure of the vast majority of American remakes of Asian horror films. The
crucial point here is not the origin of the source material, it is the fact of the remake
itself. To them, remakes demonstrate the triumph of economic over artistic considerations, signaling the creative bankruptcy of a national film industry or a cinematic
genre operating within this film industry.
While more J-horror and Asian horror films were—and still are—in the
pipeline, Hollywood lowered its sights yet again and began moving from foreign
to domestic remakes. This secondary cycle of remakes, which began to take shape
roughly four to five years after the cycle of Asian remakes had arrived in theaters,
now took on horror films from the so-called neo-horror phase of American cinema,
a period around the late 1960s and early 1970s that boasted “classics” of the American horror films by directors like John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, or George Romero.
Consequently, recent years have seen new versions of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas,
John Carpenter’s Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13, Wes Craven’s The Hills Have
Eyes, Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher, and Fred Walton’s When a Stranger Calls. The
reception of some of these films has varied. While the Craven remake can at least
boast directorial hopeful Alexandre Aja, who had been freshly imported from his
native France after scoring a major international hit with Haute Tension in 2003, the
remake of the Walton film is nothing but a pointless exercise in style—and not a
very successful one at that. James Berardinelli’s review is typical of the film’s general
reception; he blames “second-rate director Simon West” for the utter wretchedness
of the remake, calling him a director “who understands a lot about cheap shocks
and nothing about suspense, and who hasn’t met a horror movie cliché he eschews”
and the film itself “as emasculated and lifeless as any recent ‘scary’ movie” (Review of
When a Stranger Calls).
At the current moment, nothing seems safe from the greedy hands of studio
executives out for a quick remake. George Romero was targeted with a remake of

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xi

Night of the Living Dead (Zach Snyder, 2004), Carpenter by Rob Zombie with a
remake of Halloween (2007), and Hitchcock became fair game too: after Gus Van
Sant’s Psycho (1998), a remake of The Birds, helmed by Martin Campbell, is in the
works (expected release date 2009). Variety also reports that a series of remakes
of 1930s Universal horror films is currently being planned, starting with films on
Dracula and the Wolf Man, each helmed by a respectable director.4 At what must
be considered the bottom of the slump, even remakes of remakes are possible now.
The recent announcement of a new version of “John Carpenter’s The Thing” in the
Guardian, for example, reads like this:
Hollywood is remaking John Carpenter’s 1982 horror film The Thing, the
latest in a line of updated versions of the director’s oeuvre. The 1982 version
starred Kurt Russell as a member of an Antarctic research base that comes
under attack by a deeply unpleasant alien. Other Carpenter remakes include
The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13, while Rob Zombie is preparing his no
doubt unique take on Halloween. (“In Brief ”)
What is striking about this announcement is not so much the omission of any
reference to John W. Campbell’s original story, but to Christian Nyby’s The Thing
from Another World (1951), which suggests that, with the obliteration of all historical
memory among viewers and makers of horror film, we also see the vanishing of the
boundary between original and remake, which, in turn, signals the abandoning of
originality as a standard of critical evaluation. One wonders how long it will take,
after this latest remake has been released, that someone will begin thinking about
remaking the remake of John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing from Another World.
And after that . . . if the money’s right . . . remaking that one . . . and after that . . . the
sky’s the limit!
Not surprising, the response from fans is overwhelmingly negative. A cursory
cruise through some horror-related Web sites produces pages with titles such as
“The Ten Worst Horror Remakes of All-Time” (FilmSchoolRejects), “I spit on
your horror movie remakes, sequels: A horror fan laments the current state of one
of his favorite genres” (msnbc.com), and “Something Must Be Done about Horror
Movie Remakes” ( Jake Hjelmtveit).5 The horror film Web site Bloody-Disgusting.
com hosted a discussion among its readers in the late fall of 2005 in which the basic
question—“Do you think horror movies are done for?”—itself is indicative of the
mood among fans.6 The horror film director Larry Fessenden sees this slump not
in the future but as already in progress: “Recently, horror movies have fetishized
serial killers and clinically gruesome effects, as we become possessed by the arbitrariness of violence and our ability to recreate it in the movies. This is a slump”
(Glass Eye Pictures). In an article on the state of horror film in the Onion, Scott

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Tobias writes: “It seems to me that the genre has hit a crisis point creatively. J-horror
is dying off, Hollywood is running out of ’70s and ’80s horror staples to remake, and
surely at some point, the Saw and Final Destination franchises will lose their novelty”
(“Crosstalk”).
While directors like Fessenden himself linger in the economic margins of
the genre, mainstream Hollywood settled on the promotion of a small number of
younger directors as the next generation of great horror auteurs. With three films
under his belt at the end of 2007, Rob Zombie is offered up as an exemplary new
voice—an attempt that falls short since his first two films (House of 1000 Corpses,
The Devil’s Rejects) are deeply mired in 1970s “hillbilly horror” and his third and
most recent film is a remake of a canonical horror film, John Carpenter’s Halloween.
Similarly, Alexandre Aja has made a name for himself with a mainstream remake
of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and is slated for two other remakes: Silent
Night, Deadly Night and Piranha (imdb.com/name/nm0014960/). This leaves Hollywood hopeful Eli Roth, whose next project is not based on an original screenplay
but is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Cell (imdb.com/title/tt0775440/), and
whose reputation so far rests on only one original film and its sequel. Even though
the original Hostel stirred up considerable controversy, and could even pride itself
on having initiated the cycle of “torture porn” films, its sequel already proved to be
commercially disappointing.7 If this is the field of contenders to replace 1970s neohorror directors, then not only does the present look bleak, the future looks dubious, too.

“Utt e r ly W r e tc h e d”: T h e Ac a d e m i c D i s c u ss i o n
Academic studies of American horror film published between 2002 and
2006 chime in with such dirges when they reach the present moment. Reynold
Humphries, writing in 2002, concludes his discussion in The American Horror
Film with a section aptly titled “Where Do We Go From Here?” It begins with this
statement: “The state of things is not conducive to optimism, let alone enthusiasm”
(189). Though Humphries finds a few rare exceptions to the general malaise (he
praises Craven’s Scream and the films of M. Night Shyamalan), he also concludes
that “several swallows do not make a summer,” adding, somewhat despondently: “It
is patent that we shall see no more films of the caliber of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which represents for the present writer everything that a horror movie can
and should be. I shall therefore conclude by repeating my question: where do we go
from here?” (195).
Kendall Phillips, writing four years after Humphries, concludes his book Projected Fears (2006) on a similarly somber note when he states: “the American horror

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xiii

film has fallen back into one of its periods of slumber” (195). Immediately, he zeroes
in on the plague of remakes, citing Silver’s and Zemeckis’s Dark Castle films as cautionary examples, calling them “predictable” and “utterly wretched” (195). Though
the George W. Bush years, with their “general sense of hysteria, fear, and paranoia”
(196) would, in theory, provide fertile breeding ground for the horror film, Phillips speculates, “horror films may have been muzzled for a time” (196). Given the
constraints on commercial filmmaking in the mainstream, politically sensitive topics may be . . . well, just too sensitive even (or especially?) for horror films to tackle.
Nonetheless, Phillips ends on a slightly more positive note than Humphries, casting a vote of confidence for the genre’s “remarkable capacity to transform itself and
reconnect, no matter how irrelevant it may seem, to the cultural currents of the day”
(197).8
Unlike Phillips’s and Humphries’s straightforward disdain for the current horror film, Peter Hutchings strikes a slightly less judgmental note in his discussion
of recent trends in horror in the concluding section of The Horror Film, published
in 2004 and entitled “The View from Here and Now.” Hutchings lists Hollywood’s
exploitation of Japanese films, as well as recent trends in European horror cinema,
as phenomena whose true significance in the development of the genre will require
historical distance to emerge clearly (216–17). “Our retrospective views of horror
history,” Hutchings cautions his readers, “have often tidied up the genre in their
attempts to categorise and make sense of it, stressing the importance of some generic
types and marginalizing or ignoring others” (217). In accordance with his ability,
throughout the entire book, to integrate distinctions into his arguments finer than
those in Humphries and Phillips, Hutchings defers judgment. “I have no idea what
the future of the horror genre might be,” he concludes, “but I look forward to it with
keen interest” (217).
Despite such expressions of optimism, there is a sense that, as much as Hutchings may strive for level-headed objectivity, not everything is right with the horror film today. When Hutchings states his belief in “the changeability and unpredictability” of the genre (216)—a vote of confidence echoing Phillips’s belief in the
genre’s “remarkable capacity to transform itself ”—one wonders why such a vote of
confidence is necessary at all. If the genre were at the top of its game, it would hardly
require such hearty endorsement. Similarly, Hutchings closes with an appreciative
look not at recent American productions, but at British, German, and French horror films, suggesting that this is where potentially significant trends in horror film
are taking place. As a rhetorical gesture, the omission of American films from those
closing remarks speaks volumes.
A similar slight by omission can also be found in those recent books on the horror film that do not follow a strict chronology and thus do not necessarily find themselves confronted with teleological problems in discussing the genre’s development.

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Joseph Maddrey’s Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, published in 2004, imports
such teleological arguments by positing legitimate end points in the development
of American horror film. The book’s last chapter, detailing the final stage in horror
film history, is devoted to Wes Craven’s Scream films.9 Also, in the second section
of the book, in which each chapter presents one notable horror auteur, the final
chapter is given to Craven. After Craven, so Maddrey insinuates, nothing much of
significance happens. Obviously, for a book published eight years after the release
of Scream, making this particular director the pinnacle of horror film is a deliberate
and significant choice. Since Nightmares in Red, White and Blue is one of the more
popular (if not populist) treatments of the horror film, straddling the fence between
academic and general audiences, Maddrey’s obvious sympathies for Craven’s Scream
are not all that surprising. After all, the controversy about the film seemed to be a
purely academic matter; mainstream audiences, by and large, liked the film, and
only hardcore fans of horror appeared “clearly troubled by the film’s commercial success” ( Jancovich, “A Real Shocker” 475).
Mark Jancovich, editor of Horror: The Film Reader, also feels compelled to
wrestle with Scream and its position at the end of horror film history. Writing in
2002, he cannot yet account for what is to come when he states that, “as the cycle of
post-Scream films seems to be coming to an end, it is difficult to say where the genre
will go next” (7). Though this section of his introduction, entitled “A Brief History of the Horror Film,” ends on a somber note similar to that in Humphries and
Phillips, the following section, “Re-examining the History of Horror,” also recognizes that periods “rewrite the past and so create their own heritage” (8). Jancovich
acknowledges that all narrative histories depend on a sense of proper ending that
endows them with “a sense of perfect fulfillment” (9), and thus with a set of criteria
that allow critics to make comparable value judgments. This idea of the essential
constructedness of all genre histories, which is also present in Hutchings’s excellent discussion, suggests that the key issue here is not so much the consensus about
the current crisis in horror film that seems to reign among all critics mentioned
before. Instead, it raises the question how critics lacking such meta-awareness position themselves toward this trope, and thus how it affects the writing of horror film
history.

T h e R h e to r i c o f C r i s i s R e co n s i d e r e d: Ac a d e m i c A n x i e t i e s
Jancovich’s comments illustrate the problems that all writers of film histories face
when they are dealing with a genre that, at the time of writing, is still a vital element
in the cultural landscape. Who knows what twists and turns, ups and downs, this
genre is going to go through in the future? Though academics are not in the business

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xv

of predicting the future, most historiographic writing, especially when it approaches
the present, requires a sense of direction for its narrative to take shape. Without
such teleological underpinnings, it is difficult to show similarities and differences,
trace patterns of influence, and demonstrate developments in the interplay between
texts and their variable contexts. One critic might tell the story of American horror
cinema as the story of the slow and steady decline of the genre; another, as the story
of its ascent from modest, inauspicious beginnings to prominence; yet another critic
might tell it as the story of the birth, death, and rebirth of the genre. Just as the question of beginnings, of proper origins, is a crucial one for the construction of such
narratives, so is the problem of endings. History does not end, but historiographic
narratives require closure; the demands of form and format exceed those of empirical objectivity. It is for this reason, as much as for their professed personal reasons,
that the critics cited above express such optimism on the genre’s future. Such a statement serves as a rhetorical ritual that grants their narratives closure, even if the logic
of the argument makes such closure impossible. The ritual, common to all historical
narratives that end in the present, acknowledges the fact that nobody knows what
is going to happen in the future, and by acknowledging it, neutralizes its effects. It
gives historians the opportunity to legitimize their interest in their topic, or their
enthusiasm for it, or their confidence that it will remain a vital form of expression
relevant to the culture at large.
Hence, I would like to take Hutchings’s point about the essential constructedness of all historiographic writing as my point of departure, moving on from a
description of the crisis—or rather: the alleged crisis—of American horror film
in the last ten years to its analysis. Let’s take the complaints about sequels. While,
on the one hand, it is easy to see how the sequel, especially when it becomes the
dominant expression of a cinematic genre, signals this genre’s creative exhaustion—
the triumph of the box office over the auteur’s chair—film historians, as much as
they dislike sequels, will be forced to concede that sequels are the bread and butter
of horror film. If the examples of Friday the 13th, Halloween, or Nightmare on Elm
Street will demonstrate the ubiquity of sequels but, simultaneously, underwrite the
argument about creative exhaustion, then perhaps reaching further back into the
past is necessary to make the point that sequels are not irreconcilable with creativity.
A canonical horror film from the studio era like James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein demonstrates that a sequel—in this case to Whale’s own Frankenstein, which
is generally considered the lesser film—can sometimes be more inspired than its
original. In fact, critics have acknowledged that Universal Studios based its formative influence on American horror film, starting in the 1930s, on the franchising of
monsters and the creation of sequels as parts of these franchises—a fact that has
not hampered their acceptance into the canon of American horror cinema. More
recent examples of respected sequels are those of the Alien franchise, helmed by

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respectable mainstream directors like James Cameron or David Fincher. Pointing to past examples of what one might call successful sequels does not exonerate
all sequels from the suspicion of creative attenuation, but it does cast doubt upon
equating the concept of the sequel with creative bankruptcy.
Similarly, the argument that considers remakes—both of foreign and of
domestic films—symptomatic of the crisis of contemporary American horror film
fails to hold up when seen in the context of past practice. I have already mentioned
John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing, considered both a commercial and critical success. Richard Matheson’s I am Legend had been adapted to the screen twice
before it was turned into a Will Smith vehicle in 2007. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
went through three incarnations before Oliver Hirschbiegel, freshly imported to
Hollywood after helming the German blockbuster Der Untergang, had the opportunity for a new adaptation in 2007.10 No matter whether these examples prove a
particular susceptibility of the horror genre for the remake or not, Hollywood could
never resist the temptation to go with projects that came with the preapproval of
prior commercial success. It is simply good business to capitalize on a general awareness of material that does not have to be created from scratch in costly advertising
campaigns, minimizing the risk of commercial failure and translating this element
of predictability into easy marketability.
Similarly, Hollywood has always entertained complex yet lively relationships
with other national film industries. One example of this readiness to import what’s
been true and tested elsewhere is the readiness with which foreign talent has always
been welcomed to America. Just as without the European refugees during the 1930s
and 1940s there would have been no film noir, American horror cinema profited from
such émigrés as Karl Freund or Val Lewton. Consequently, there is nothing new
in Hollywood’s importing of directors like Alexandre Aja from France, Guillermo
del Toro from Mexico, Oliver Hirschbiegel from Germany, or Hideo Nakata from
Japan in order to capitalize on their talent, experience, and credentials.
Once we see all of these complaints—about sequels, remakes, and foreign
imports—in the larger historical context, what begins to emerge is one possible,
albeit broad, response to the complaint that American horror film is in a crisis,
which goes like this: things have always been this way. What appears as a sorry state
of creative attenuation is, in fact, nothing more than a local manifestation of industrial practices that are a tried-and-true element of Hollywood filmmaking. Those
who tend to see the symptoms of the crisis of American horror film today—or perhaps even its causes—within these practices suffer from historic myopia and must,
therefore, be wrong.
Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is unlikely to put an end to the complaints
about the sorry state of American horror film because it brackets—regardless of
production and marketing practices—the question of quality. However historically

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consistent the conditions of production for horror film have been, it is equally true
that there have always been good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, popular and
unpopular horror films—present films included. To insist that there is no current
crisis because “things have always been this way” would be to insist that there have
never been bad horror films at all. The anecdotal evidence may be convincing, but
the argumentative logic is flawed.11
If the question seems impossible to answer whether there actually is or isn’t a
crisis in contemporary American horror film, then it makes more sense to ask how
the trope of crisis functions within the discourse on horror. That is, regardless of
whether any individual fan, reviewer, or critic is right or wrong, we can try to determine, by looking at the larger patterns within the public debate, which ideologies are
served or rebuked through the rhetoric of crisis.
A useful starting-point for such deliberations might be to examine the term
“crisis” and its connotations. Besides suggesting a crucial sense of urgency, the word
“crisis” refers to a period of instability or danger that, eventually, will reveal itself as
a turning point, a moment of decisive change, within a larger narrative. It suggests
upheaval, a separation of the past from the future, of the wheat from the chaff. And
yet, as strongly as the term emphasizes the traumatic nature of the experience, all
of its uses carry the connotation that the current moment, fraught with disappointment or uncertainty as it might be, is merely an episode in a larger story—the word
“slump,” used by many of the fans and reviewers I have cited earlier, also reflects this
sense of brighter days ahead. So do the assurances by academic critics like Kendall
Phillips or Reynold Humphries who close their historical overviews with a sense
of guarded optimism about the ability of horror to bounce back, repair itself, and
return to the spotlight as a vital and relevant cinematic genre.
The last time that this was true for American horror film, if the majority of the
critics is to be believed who lament the current decline of the genre, was the 1970s
when “neo-horror” stepped onto the scene. David Church’s perceptive remark that
“American horror’s renaissance in the 1970s remains a largely romanticized period
now” explains precisely the critical move that accompanies so many of the negative accounts of contemporary American horror film. In his preface to Jay McRoy’s
anthology Japanese Horror Cinema, for example, Christopher Sharrett complains
that “distinguished works,” by which he means the films of Romero, Hooper, and
Craven, “have been replaced by hi-tech rollercoaster rides,” and that “important
horror films of the past [. . .] have been subjected to indulgent, insulting remakes
that strip away the original work’s radical or contentious ideas” (xi).12 Other critics equally assess the horror film by “the many radical challenges” it has “made to
dominant culture” (Sharrett xi): one might think of Reynold Humphries’s wistful
assessment of one of the key films of that period: “It is patent that we shall see no
more films of the caliber of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which represents for the

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present writer everything that a horror movie can and should be” (The American
Horror Film 195).13
Sharrett’s and Humphries’s high opinion of 1970s neo-horror, which reflects
an attitude common among the academic authors I have cited before, validates a
period in the horror genre for the same qualities that incurred its condemnation
in its own time: its willingness to transgress more radically social boundaries than
any of its predecessors, as well as for its refusal to incur cultural capital; Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, for example, is symptomatic for this attitude, both
because of its legendary effect on its original audience, documented famously by
Roger Ebert’s review of the film, and because of its notoriously minimal budget.14
Within academic criticism, 1970s neo-horror has already been safely integrated into
postwar American cultural history. It is when measured against this criteria of its
canonization—transgressiveness coupled with the mystique of rebellion and political subversiveness—that contemporary horror films, with their mainstream credentials, fall short.
It is important to be historically precise in the discussion of this canonization.
David Church’s insight was not that the current rhetoric of crisis about contemporary American horror film has triggered the canonization of 1970s neo-horror, but
that, in fact, it “remains a largely romanticized period” (Offscreen.com, my emphasis). In other words, 1970s neo-horror had already been canonized before the mid1990s, so that the current rhetoric of crisis most likely constitutes a reiteration, a
confirmation, and, most important, an instrumentalization of this canonization.
Church’s use of the term “romanticized” suggests a more complex and involved stage
of development than that of discovery and initial recognition.
If one were to look for signs of this initial stage, it would be best to look for
signs of anxiety on the part of the authors—an anxiety concomitant with neo-horror’s noncanonical status. Symptoms of this anxiety can be found in what I would
consider the foundational text of scholarly engagement with neo-horror—Carol
Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws, published in 1992. Clover proceeds against
the suspicion that the sheer popularity of the low-budget slasher film would make
it less of a worthwhile object of study. The problem of academic legitimacy is also
exacerbated by the fact that she has chosen the least-respectable horror subgenre at
the time. In the introduction, Clover describes encounters with people who, as she
puts it, “‘come out’ to [her] about their secret appetite for exploitation horror” (7),
an embarrassing position from which she can distance herself only by insisting upon
her own scholarly status setting her apart.15
To some degree, Clover’s anxiety is triggered by the lack of academic legitimacy
that clings to all popular culture, among which horror film in general would have to
take its place. But since James Twitchell had already noted in 1985 that horror was
becoming a legitimate subject of academic study because “the canon of literature
is being expanded” (9), the broader concern about legitimacy is outweighed by a

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xix

more specific one: that neo-horror, at the time Clover is writing, is still lacking the
legitimacy that “classic” horror had already attained. While, after decades of serious
academic work on the horror film by scholars of high caliber, someone revisiting
the “classics” of the genre would hardly have reason any longer to feel like a pariah
among his peers, someone studying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would. This,
I think, is a process that repeats itself periodically. As generations of scholarship
dovetail more or less smoothly with successive moves toward canonization, the old
anxieties return and are put to rest. Applied to the rhetoric of the current crisis of
American horror film, this means that the anxiety that attaches itself to the most
recent period of production is a symptom of the convergence of two factors: the
negotiation of legitimacy in the context of institutionalized professional structures
on the one hand, and the perpetual misalignment between film production and
academic criticism on the other.
One way in which scholars respond to this anxiety is by reorienting themselves
toward spaces of safety; that is, toward the canon. Kendall Phillips, for example,
works his way through twentieth-century American horror cinema in Projected Fears
by devoting each of his nine chapters to a film he considers essential to the genre.
The canonical lineup contains no surprises—from Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, and The Exorcist to The Silence of the Lambs and Scream, Phillips is content
with rounding up the usual suspects. Each film is introduced by a plot summary—a
gesture that seems redundant if the film were, in fact, as well known as the author
suggests, but still makes perfect sense as a rhetorical move that reinforces, by way
of ritualized repetition, the idea that tribute must be paid to canonical texts. The
summary is followed by a discussion of cultural contexts, key themes, and motifs, as
well as by a brief consideration of the film’s legacy. Given the fact that Phillips’s book
is published in 2005, it is significant that, having started with Browning’s Dracula
(1931), it ends with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), ignoring, or perhaps even dismissing, six years of more recent production.
Humphries and Maddrey follow the same pattern, working their way from the
early period of American horror cinema, through the Universal films and Val Lewton’s RKO films in the 1930s and 1940s, toward the cold war, and ultimately to the
late 1960s, when “classic” horror film gives way to “neo-horror.” Phillips, Reynolds,
and Maddrey retrace the same essential trajectory. With varying degrees of subtlety,
they shift their critical emphasis only slightly, ultimately confirming the basic narrative of American horror film as it was already laid down in earlier histories of the
horror film—I am specifically thinking of Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of
the Horror Film (1967), to be followed, in the mid-1980s, by James Twitchell’s Dreadful Pleasures (1985).16
While these studies confirm canonical assumptions about American horror
cinema, Mark Jancovich’s Horror and Peter Hutchings’s The Horror Film address
canonicity itself. Hutchings’s book embeds the analysis of individual films in a

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broader discussion of the questions that academic criticism has been asking about
these films. As it gathers ideas around themes like, for example, audience behavior,
gender issues, and representations of otherness, the book constantly raises the question of why anyone would be interested in these films. It asks not just what it is that
should be appreciated in a horror film—the question that stands at the forefront of
Phillips’s Projected Fears and Maddrey’s Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. It also
describes what it is that consecutive generations of critics have appreciated about a
horror film. Both approaches confirm the canonicity of the films discussed—the
former by reaffirming the value of the films themselves, the latter by entrenching
critical judgments that have come to gather canonical legitimacy themselves.
In his role as editor, Jancovich is in the privileged position to further particularly the canonicity of horror film scholarship. Many of his selections have been
frequently anthologized: Robin Wood’s “The American Nightmare: Horror in
the 70s,” Linda Williams’s “When the Woman Looks,” Carol Clover’s “Her Body,
Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Barbara Creed’s “Horror and the MonstrousFeminine: An Imaginary Abjection.”17 The frequency with which these critics and
their work are cited illustrates which critical paradigms currently dominate the discussion of horror film, just as their inclusion in Jancovich’s anthology reinforces this
dominant position.18
This commercial rationale of academic publishing tends to underwrite such
canonization as well. While academic publishing is not strictly subject to the same
business rationale as commercial publishing in the mainstream, making a profit is
as much a concern here as anywhere else. As university presses act in accordance
with this economic rationale, they are more likely to solicit or greenlight books that
promise revenues not just from the small, specialized audiences of experts working
in the same field, but from a broader audience within the same professional field that
gathers around this small community of experts. In the absence of a strong current
trend in scholarship, to which academic publishers could hitch their wagon, and the
absence of a high-profile celebrity author, the most reasonable choice is publishing
books that have the potential of being used as textbooks for college classrooms.
Academic studies of horror film with a narrow, historically or thematically specific
focus are the least likely candidates for such classroom use. Broadly conceived introductions to the genre, though not specifically written as textbooks, are best suited
to such use, and thus promise the best returns on one’s investment.

Fa n D i s co u r s e: C u lt u r a l C a p i ta l a n d G e n e r at i o n a l C h a n g e
Since the reasons that academics have to subscribe to this rhetoric of crisis are intricately connected to the social pressures of their professional environment, these reasons may interact with the realm of reviewers and fans, but they are

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xxi

unlikely to be valid outside of the specific professional niche. What fans and general
audiences have to say about American horror film today contributes to the broader
discussion but is not restrained by the social and professional pressures under
which academics speak and act. In order to understand their predominantly negative responses to recent American horror film production, let me return briefly to a
source I quoted earlier—Mark Jancovich pointing out about Wes Craven’s Scream:
“The guarded responses [by fans] are also clearly troubled by the film’s commercial
success” (“A Real Shocker” 475).
To the degree that horror film fans consider themselves members of a distinct
subculture, they adhere to the rules and conventions that define what Sarah Thornton, in reference to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, has called “subcultural
capital.” Subcultural capital strives to delineate the boundaries of subcultures as
they set themselves aside from—or diametrically against—mainstream culture; it
defines membership in the subcultural community as conferring “status on its owner
in the eyes of the relevant beholder” (Thornton 11), which is likely to be another
member of the same subculture but could also be a (real or perceived) member of
the mainstream. Just as subcultures require a well-calibrated degree of secrecy, by
which they affect mechanisms that balance exclusion and self-perpetuation, subcultural capital, as Thornton reminds us, is essentially “embodied in the form of ‘being
in the know’” (11).
Subcultural capital is threatened by, and thus must be defended against, the
continuing and perhaps even rising popularity of American horror film. More
important, however, it must defend itself against production and distribution
strategies that, by virtue of their very success, have begun to expand the audience demographics for the horror film genre to include large audiences without a
pronounced genre preference with the result that no clearly discernible segment
of the market remains the sole property of hardcore fans. Predominant among
strategies of demographic expansion are the popularization of the PG-rated horror films, which have dovetailed with the box office hits of so-called quiet horror
films like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) or Alejandro Amenabar’s
The Others (2001); the crossover of horror film into fantasy and action-adventure,
especially at the budgetary level of the summer blockbuster, ranging from the
Blade, Resident Evil, and Underworld to the Mummy franchises; and the casting
of hot young actors and actresses for which Scream—featuring Courtney Cox,
erstwhile from Friends, and Neve Campbell, wildly popular at the time from Party
of Five—provided the commercial blueprint.19 To the degree that the American
film industry is marketing horror films as products not for a niche market, limited
by the highly restrictive ratings that come with extreme violence and graphic gore,
but for the broadest possible audience, those who consider themselves fans of horror film will have to patrol the boundaries of their territory more aggressively than
ever before.

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One such form of boundary patrolling and ensuring that one is “in the know”
is the reorientation of interest and consumption from local to foreign productions.
The initial phase of J-horror’s rising popularity in the United States, for example,
was largely driven by a search, on the part of hardcore fans, for more exotic and
extreme forms of horror film: the name of British DVD and video distributor Tartan’s imprint for these imports into the English-speaking market—Asia Extreme—
is emblematic of this agenda. Since much of the distribution of these foreign films
within the American market did not include theatrical release, Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA) ratings could, for the most part, be circumnavigated, linking the appeal of the exotic with the expanded range of transgressive
contents.
Another response to the “mainstreaming” of recent American horror films is
the horror fans’ turning away from contemporary productions and returning to
canonical horror films and directors, a trend repeating itself, albeit for slightly different reasons, among academics. What goes along with this move into more obscure,
less easily accessible niche markets is, of course, the maligning of the mainstream
taste: as one is invested with, the other is divested of cultural capital. The release,
for example, of George Romero’s long-delayed and highly anticipated Land of the
Dead in 2005 prompted responses from fans that were not all unanimously positive
but consistently deployed terminology in the service of canonical validation both
for the film and its maker. Among the User Comments on the IMDb Web site, for
example, is this review that is representative in its double move of praising the film
by distancing it from the present horror film production: “George Romero returns
to the genre he had perfected with his ‘dead’ trilogy,” the author writes. “The film,
while not perfect, is still a [sic] achievement in bringing a once dead genre back to
life. And who better to do it than the master himself, George A. Romero.”
Obviously, none of these strategies by which horror film fans create, affirm,
and secure subcultural capital are entirely without their problems and ironies.
For example, fans who express their admiration for John Carpenter’s Halloween
on the basis of the film’s minuscule budget, as opposed to the slickness and high
production values of many forgettable contemporary horror films, tend to ignore
the fact that the film raked in profits on an unprecedented scale for such a small
film for Carpenter and his sponsors, initiating a cycle of horror films defined—like
all commercial filmmaking, even if it occurs on a small budget—by the desire to
cash in on the formula. Similarly, mainstream attempts at co-opting subcultural
capital are omnipresent, from the “grassroots” marketing campaigns for films like
The Blair Witch Project, to the courting of “classic” neo-horror audiences with such
television programs as the Showtime cable series Masters of Horror, designed and
supervised by Mick Garris, himself a horror film director with, ironically enough,
very little subcultural cache among hardcore fans. Ultimately, it is difficult, in some

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xxiii

cases perhaps even impossible, to draw clear demarcations between the commercial
mainstream and the auteurist margin, as both segments appear less in juxtaposition
than in constant dialectic negotiation with each other.
The relative merit of such subcultural responses to the mainstreaming of
American horror film notwithstanding, the overwhelming and combined effect
they produce within the public debate is the maligning of current American horror film production. To indulge in the rhetoric of crisis legitimizes the retreat from
the commercial mainstream of the most vocal of all segments of the horror film
audience—a fact that explains the curious split between the apparently universal
dismay about the quality of recent American horror films on the one hand, and
their consistent, reliable commercial success on the other hand. In the final instance,
the rhetoric of crisis tells us more about the audiences than about the films they
have been watching.

Co n c lu s i o n
While horror film in general has entered the cultural mainstream as an
object of consumption and academia as an object of serious scholarly study, both
segments of the interpretive community—academics on the one hand, fans on the
other—contextualize their response within the same rhetoric of crisis.20 While
mass audiences tend to vote with their feet, fans and academics articulate their
position explicitly in all the places where public opinion is generated, from journals
and magazines to Web sites and fanzines—from PMLA and Fangoria to BloodyDisgusting.com and the User Comments section of IMDb. The alignment of the
predominant rhetoric that permeates these two most articulate sections of the horror film audience amplifies the sense that, indeed, American horror film today is in
a state of crisis. If those most knowledgeable about horror film agree, then it must
be true.
As both demographics seemingly validate each other, their shared position
acquires a degree of legitimacy that turns it into the framework within which all
successive critical statement on the same topic are formulated or perceived. In other
words, it develops a gravitational force that pulls in everything else around it. Those,
for example, who find merit in a particular film or director will be likely to see
their discovery as an exception from the general malaise rather than a confirmation
that, in fact, American horror film today is as vital as ever. Hence, even an opinion
that contradicts the rhetoric of crisis is ultimately reabsorbed by it and turned into
yet another confirmation of its basic assumptions. As a result, critical discourse is
blunted: finer distinctions between films and filmmakers grow blurry and aesthetic
standards are applied without much sense of their origin or appropriateness. In the

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final instance, the discursive framework constructed around the rhetoric of crisis
leads to a distorted perspective—a distortion that needs to be corrected before the
object of study can be seen clearly again. To contribute to this correction in the general discourse on contemporary American horror film, to see it clearly without the
distortion caused by the rhetoric of crisis—this is the goal of this anthology.

About This Book
Much of the general overview I have tried to provide about contemporary
American horror film in the course of my argument is perhaps overly simplified and
schematic—less egregiously so perhaps in my general argument, but most certainly
in the individual examples marshaled in its support. Any attempt to survey such a
wide and internally diversified field is prone to this risk of oversimplification. But
to the same degree that any single argument, short of a book-length study, must
remain sketchy and superficial, a collection of essays can succeed in encompassing
the variety and complexity of American horror film production within a period as
long as ten years. Hence, most of the aspects of my argument in the preceding pages
are reflected in the essays collected in this anthology.
Each essay takes as its point of departure one of the aspects of the larger discussion I have tried to unfold in the previous pages. All essays, explicitly or implicitly, acknowledge the rhetoric of crisis that surrounds current American horror film.
Instead of accommodating its dictate, however, the authors position themselves
within it as strategic interventions—to engage with or refute individual aspects of
its general argument; to recognize and describe larger trends within American horror film; and to assess their significance critically. Some of these writers, in pursuing their larger critical goal, also examine individual films and directors whose
work falls outside of the parameters set by the rhetoric of crisis, having either been
unfairly dismissed or underestimated. All work contained in the anthology, though
recognizing the rhetoric of crisis, starts from the assumption that American horror films released roughly within the last decade are neither better nor worse than
their predecessors. Hence, the goal of the anthology as a whole is to resist the pull
that emanates from the rhetoric of crisis, the tendency to equalize differences, to
pass overly generalized value judgments, and thus to miss what is genuinely unique
about individual films as well as about the total horror film production in the United
States during the last decade.
Rick Kleffel, in an interview with writer Chuck Palahniuk, has suggested, perhaps somewhat facetiously, that horror has always flourished in American culture
whenever a Republican is in the White House.21 Hence, the shadow of the George
W. Bush administration—the legitimization of its policies by the events of 9/11, as

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xxv

well as its fostering of a state of perpetual domestic crisis and foreign war—falls
over many of the essays collected here. To some degree, then, the collection as a
whole is taking inventory of the American horror film at a time of great political
turmoil. Though the change of administrations with the 2008 presidential elections
cannot be simply assumed to mark a radical turning point, it still provides a good
opportunity to pause, look back, and take stock of recent years. In exactly this spirit
of distinguishing meticulously between historical breaks and continuities, a number
of essays included here either transcend the specific historic background by paying
attention to the internal continuities of the genre or to the applications and transformations of transnational auteurism; other contributions relativize what might
otherwise occupy center stage by looking at the two terms of the Bush administration within the context of a more insidious and far-reaching framework of economically and socially determined identity politics, which goes back, at the very least, as
far as the Bill Clinton years. As each author included in the collection frames and
re-frames these issues, American horror film appears in ever-increasing depth and
complexity.
The first of the book’s three sections, entitled “Bloody America: Critical Reassessments of the Trans/-national and of Graphic Violence,” devotes itself to the task
of drawing up a cognitive map of American horror film at the present moment by
posing specific challenges to two widely held beliefs about American horror film:
that it constitutes a purely, or at least primarily, national discourse that should only
be read in relation to U.S. politics and culture; and that it has been characterized by
a steady increase in graphic violence, much of it self-indulgent and gratuitous and
thus dissociated from any directly political function. Based on the recognition that
the rhetoric of crisis is grounded, among others, in these two presuppositions, two of
the four essays lay, respectively, the foundation for a critical reassessment, while the
two other essays, respectively, apply the foundational challenge to a specific director
(and the unique shape of his style) and to a specific film (and to the body of films
assembled, both synchronically and diachronically, around its basic conceit). Christina Klein’s essay, with which the book opens, takes on the first of these beliefs—the
idea that American horror films must, first and foremost, be seen in the context of
American culture, politics, and history; or, in other words, that horror films made
in the United States must fundamentally be about the United States. Upon closer
inspection, however, this just isn’t so. To the same degree that the U.S. film industry
has already been integrated into global networks of financing, production, and distribution, something which we still, somewhat unthinkingly, like to call American
cinema has become a questionable critical presupposition. “American horror film,”
therefore, deserves a skeptical set of quotation marks. Klein’s essay suggests a number of basic variants of the new Hollywood, which, in all of its aspects, operates
within a transnational arena. The essay tilts the debate about cinematic genres from

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simple notions of national identity toward more complex considerations of globalized networks of cultural production. Based on Klein’s work, Tony Perrello sets
out to trace the transnational career of Alexandre Aja, one of the hot young horror
directors who has migrated from his native country to the U.S film industry. Within
the larger framework of transnationality, Perrello focuses specifically on the characteristic features of Aja’s style and his thematic preoccupations, which have survived
the transition from France to the United States. What emerges from the analysis
is a reconsideration of the classic auteur’s creative autonomy within the context of
what Klein describes as genre cinema’s ability to transcend national and cultural
boundaries. The essay by Blair Davis and Kial Natale takes on the second tacit
assumption about contemporary horror film, challenging the validity of the widely
held belief that American horror films, since the 1970s and 1980s, have grown consistently more violent and visually explicit. Approaching their daunting subject with
the tools of quantitative statistical analysis, the two authors survey a vast number of
American horror films with a critical eye on violence. Apart from mapping out larger
trends, their argument also suggests, through the self-conscious choice of categories
of evaluation, how the aesthetics of American horror film has shaped itself around
crucial representational issues. Just as Klein’s work prepares the ground for Perrello’s analysis, so Davis’s and Natale’s work sets the stage for Reynold Humphries’s
examination of graphic violence in director William Malone’s FearDotCom. Against
Malone’s less-than-stellar reputation as a horror auteur, and against this particular
film’s virtually unanimous critical dismissal by fans and reviewers alike, Humphries
traces in detail the film’s uneasy position between two modes of the fantastic, as well
as its unfortunate release in advance of a commercially far more successful horror
film cycle—that of so-called torture porn—which would have created more favorable conditions of reception. Reading the film self-consciously at the end of the
Bush years, and thus in the context of Abu Ghraib, CIA renditions, and the debate
on American torture, Humphries gives the film and its director credit not only for
being oddly prescient of the political issues that were to define America’s role in the
new century, but also for articulating these issues more provocatively than many of
their more highly appraised successors.
The second section of the book, entitled “The Usual Suspects: Trends and
Transformations in the Subgenres of American Horror Film,” devotes itself to the
cast of characters we all know so well from many horror films. Each one of these
iconic figures has gathered a substantial subgenre of American horror film around
itself: the teenager (both as a character and as a member of the audience), the ghost,
the slasher, and the serial killer. Maneuvering through a number of representative
films, the two authors of the first essay in this section, Pamela Craig and Martin
Fradley, carefully delineate the political and ideological issues surrounding teenage protagonists. Pointing to many films’ self-conscious and often politically astute

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xxvii

articulation of social class, gender, and race, their essay exonerates—wherever such
exoneration is called for or overdue—the American teen horror film from its critical dismissal as adolescent escapism or shameless pandering to the youth demographic. Andrew Patrick Nelson’s essay stays close to the teenager—as hero/ine,
victim, and audience member—by examining the figure of the slasher through the
lens of recent remakes. Instead of reiterating the tired assertion that remakes per se
are a sign of a genre’s creative exhaustion—a staple trope in the rhetoric of crisis—
Nelson starts with a comparison between John Carpenter’s Halloween and its recent
remake by Rob Zombie, and then expands this comparison into a demonstration
of the larger transformative mechanisms by which American filmmaking has been
appropriating earlier texts to new social and political circumstances. Honing in on
one unique variant of the mad slasher in American horror films, Philip L. Simpson’s essay provides a cogent critical overview of the serial killer film, especially in
the light of the subgenre’s intense cultural significance during the 1980s and 1990s
and its subsequent descent into relative insignificance after 9/11. While pondering
the larger questions of why and how horror film archetypes drift in and out of the
culture’s focus of attention, Simpson also demonstrates how the serial killer film,
though often pronounced dead, has instead managed to spread throughout a field
of cultural production much larger than that of a strictly defined and narrowly circumscribed cinematic genre. In fact, Simpson argues, the serial killer has even made
a comeback with recent high-profile productions directed by auteurist filmmakers
such as Spike Lee (Summer of Sam) and David Fincher (Zodiac). While it is graphic
body horror to which both the slasher and the serial killer film are dedicated, James
Kendrick’s discussion of the spiritual horror film turns toward the quieter, less visually assaultive branch of the genre. Like the essays preceding it, however, it also
acknowledges the fluctuations in popularity that come with genre cycles—fluctuations that are often mistaken for the waxing and waning in the relevance of a horror
film subgenre. Taking as its point of departure the phenomenal box office success
of The Sixth Sense and the cycle of American ghost stories it initiated, Kendrick’s
argument not only reaches back to the historical traditions which feed into contemporary ghost stories; it also speculates about the resonance that these films with
their spectral theme have for contemporary viewers, and how they are positioned
within a larger cultural landscape that often favors more overtly violent forms of
body horror.
With its third section, “Look Back in Horror: Managing the Canon of American Horror Film,” the book returns yet again to the rhetoric of crisis by reading
contemporary American horror film against its own past. All three essays collected
in this section deal with the instrumentalization of this past—as a source of canonical legitimacy for the genre at large, as well as a repository of aesthetic and political positions. In his analysis of the careers of David Cronenberg and George A.

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Introduction

Romero, Craig Bernardini charts the evolution of two notable horror film auteurs,
from their origins in what the rhetoric of crisis has construed for many as the golden
days of 1970s neo-horror, all the way toward the present moment. Whether this
present moment does, indeed, constitute a low point of American horror cinema or
not, is also a question that resurfaces in Ben Kooyman’s analysis of two other canonical American horror auteurs—Stuart Gordon and John Landis. In its detailed
analysis of identity politics in the context of the Showtime television series Masters of Horror, Kooyman also broadens a discussion that otherwise would remain
purely focused upon the world of cinema to include contextual media. To the same
degree that Bernardini and Kooyman recognize the processes of canonization and
their strategic use within contemporary American horror film, Jay McRoy reads
the aesthetic instrumentalization of canonicity in Robert Rodriguez’ and Quentin
Tarantino’s Grindhouse. Like his fellow critics’ analysis, McRoy’s reading focuses on
the internal contradictions, the ruptures, rifts, and inconsistencies that run through
these uses of the past, real or imagined—not simply to dismiss these efforts as disingenuous or inauthentic but to assess them within the larger context of a culture in
which notions of authenticity have long since become problematic.
Since, in this very introductory essay, I have drawn time and again on an essay
entitled “Return of the Return of the Repressed: Notes on the American Horror
Film (1991–2006),” which is easily the most comprehensive, well-informed, and
cogent summary statement on the current state of affairs of American horror film
published so far, it is fitting that this book concludes with a closing statement by its
author, David Church. His essay takes as its point of departure personal reflections
on having been a fan and a scholar of horror film, in turn troubled and delighted
by his chosen genre. Church rounds out the deconstruction of the rhetoric of crisis
I have begun in this introduction by adding to the discussion the consideration of
the demographics, which plays a crucial role in the reception and the discursive
response to American horror film. As Church outlines the difficulties in narrativizing the history and development of a genre as rich and varied as this one, he also
reiterates, in the context of one specific film and specific historical events of the
last ten-odd years, the continued cultural significance of horror film as a form of
cultural expression. Though the age of an author hardly matters anywhere else in
this anthology, I consider it fitting that the final statement in the book belongs to
a young critic at the start of his academic career. In more ways than one, Church’s
afterword opens the discussion to a future that’s not always going to be smooth and
easy but promises never to be dull either—of American horror film as much as of
its critical discussion within the academic community.

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N ot e s
I would like to express my gratitude to the Research Department of Sogang University, which,
by providing a Special Research Grant in 2008, made the completion of this book, as well as
the writing of this introduction, possible. Integrated into this essay are ideas initially developed
in an essay entitled “Academic Film Criticism, the Rhetoric of Crisis, and the Current State of
American Horror Cinema: Thoughts on Canonicity and Academic Anxiety,” published in College
Literature 34.4 (Fall 2007). These ideas have also been presented at the conference “New Nightmares: Issues in Contemporary Horror Cinema” at Manchester Metropolitan University in the
spring of 2008. I would like to express my gratitude to the staff at College Literature, as well as the
organizers of the conference, for their support of this project. This also goes for all contributors
to this book—for their hard work, patience, and dedication, as well as for Leila Salisbury, for her
exceptional kindness. More broadly, my thanks go to friends and colleagues whose contributions
have been less direct yet none the less significant: David Willingham and Elizabeth Frasier, Donald Bellomy and Jae Roe, Jay McRoy, and Rudolphus Teeuwen. I also want to thank my family
for their unwavering support, and, last in this list but first on my mind, Aryong: thank you for
enduring more cinematic chills with me than any fan of romantic comedies should reasonably be
expected to.
1. For more detailed information, see, for example, the top 100 list of “2007 Domestic
Grosses” at the Box Office Mojo Web site: http://www. boxofficemojo.com/ yearly/
chart/?yr=2007&p=.htm.
2. The slump is defined primarily in economic terms as the entry continues: “Even the
re-release of a restored version of The Exorcist in September of 2000 didn’t quite cause a stir.
Also, near-defunct franchises such as Freddy Vs. Jason somehow made it into theatres” (en.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_film).
3. Just to illustrate how much these assessments reflect personal taste, let me add Rafferty’s
take on the same film: “The best, I’d say, is Walter Salles’s ‘Dark Water’ (2005), whose 2002
Japanese original was, like ‘Ringu,’ adapted from a story by Koji Suzuki and directed by Mr.
Nakata. It’s much simpler than the elaborate ‘Ring’ saga: just a straightforward haunted-house
tale set in a decrepit apartment building, where a mother and her little daughter suffer the
supernatural consequences of previous tenants’ sins” (Rafferty, New York Times, January 27,
2008).
4. For further information, see Diane Garrett, “Proyas to direct Universal’s ‘Dracula,’”
Variety, July 10, 2007. http://www.variety.com/ article/VR1117968320.html?categoryid=13&cs=1.
5. See http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/the-ten-worst-horror-remakes-of-alltime.php, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9805698/, and http://media.www. msureporter.com/
media/storage/paper937/news/ 2006/05/02/Varietycommentary/Something.Must.Be.Done
.About.Horror.Movie.Remakes-2021768.shtml.
6. For the full discussion of this question, access http://bloody-disgusting.com/forums/
archive/index.php/t-3839.html.
7. Roth is primarily associated with the horror film cycle David Edelstein has famously
referred to as “torture porn.” Given the recent success of such films as Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield
(2008) and Frank Darabont’s The Mist (2008), one might surmise that the “torture porn” cycle
has already played itself out. For detailed information on “torture porn,” see David Edelstein’s
article, “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,” New York Magazine, January 26,
2006. http://nymag.com/movies /features/15622/.

xxx

Introduction

8. David Church also takes this position when he concludes his survey of recent American
horror film with this statement: “Though it is a consistent moneymaker, the horror film’s creative
pulse seems to rise and fall periodically from one decade to the next, and it appears to be in a
trough at the moment” (Offscreen.com).
9. This is in spite of the fact that the final chapter of the book’s historical overview of the
horror film genre is devoted to recent vampire films—a somewhat shoddy glitch in the book’s
structuring.
10. The term “remake” might have to be modified in these two cases, since both remakes can
claim fidelity to the original novel, by Richard Matheson or Jack Finney, respectively, rather than
having to stand up in a direct comparison with another film.
11. Similarly, we can rule out two other options that evolve from this insistence on the
historical continuity of production and marketing conditions: that American horror films today
really are all bad, and, conversely, that American horror films today are actually better than their
predecessors. The gross overgeneralization involved in each assertion aside, I have found no
evidence that any critic actually takes one or the other extreme position. In the final instance,
Sturgeon’s Law seems to apply to American horror cinema as much as to the field of science
fiction about which Theodore Sturgeon had originally made his famous pronouncement (that is,
that 90 percent of everything is crap).
12. I have discussed elsewhere horror film’s subversive potential and the specific significance,
as well as the specific attraction that it, therefore, holds for academics—an attraction that
reverberates through both Reynolds’s and, even more so, Sharrett’s words. See Steffen Hantke,
“Shudder as We Think: Reflections on Horror and/or Criticism,” Paradoxa: Studies in World
Literary Genres 17 (Fall 2002): 1–9.
13. Perhaps this anxiety has also become superimposed upon some of the millenarian
rumblings that happened to take place roughly in the middle of the ten years that comprise the
time period under investigation. Mark Edmundson’s popular and, at the time of its publication,
much-quoted book Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), is rife with references to millennial angst.
Edmundson cites, for example, the “rise of the recovered memory movement” during the 1990s
(36), “John Wayne Bobbitt and his wife Lorena” (14), the “Nancy Kerrigan–Tonya Harding
episode” (15), and the O. J. Simpson trial (9–12) as examples of what he considers the Gothic side
of American culture. To this, Edmundson posits a counterforce that he calls “the culture of facile
transcendence,” best exemplified by “the angel craze,” “power ads,” and other “formulas for easy
self-remaking that now flourish in the American marketplace” (xv). Taken together, these two
factors made, according to Edmundson, “the last decade of the century (and millennium)” a “time
of anxiety” and “dread about the future” (3). Later critics, such as Kendall Phillips, see the effect
of 9/11 and, more important, its instrumentalization throughout the Bush years, as the cause
for the “general sense of hysteria, fear, and paranoia” (196) which provides, simultaneously and
somewhat paradoxically, fertile breeding ground for the horror film as well as the conditions for
the curtailing by means of deliberate censorship and public opinion (“horror films may have been
muzzled for a time”). Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), 196.
14. Ebert’s review, originally published January 5, 1967, in the Chicago Sun Times, can be found
at rogerebert.com. http://rogerebert. suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19670105/
REVIEWS/.
15. To some degree, this is not an anxiety about the horror genre but about the popular. In
Projected Fears, Kendall Phillips openly admits to this anxiety. “While it is certainly true that the

Introduction

xxxi

study of popular culture has gained great ground in academic circles over the last few decades,” he
writes, “there is still a strong strain of contempt for those cultural artifacts and icons that attain
wide levels of popularity” (1).
16. Twitchell lists a series of earlier books on horror film, most of them from the 1970s—a
list worthwhile considering as evidence for neo-horror’s effect on the standing of the genre (9).
However, in contrast to Twitchell’s own book, published by Oxford University Press, most of the
books on Twitchell’s list are published by more mainstream publishers, suggesting a progression
from a fan audience to an audience that increasingly was composed of academics and scholars.
17. Wood’s importance is indisputable: his work is referenced in every single book I
mentioned, often quite extensively as well. Creed and Clover, already anthologized in Ken
Gelder’s The Horror Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), are referenced in both Phillips and
Hutchings; Humphries references Clover, but not Creed.
18. Stephen Prince’s anthology The Horror Film, published by Rutgers University Press in
2004, deserves notable mention as the only introductory reader, published roughly within the
same time frame as the ones discussed above, that assembles a refreshingly idiosyncratic group
of texts. For a more detailed discussion of this reader, see my review of the book in Paradoxa:
Studies in World Literary Genres 20 (Fall 2006): 312–15.
19. Examples among more recent films would have to include the careers of such actresses as
Naomi Watts or Sarah Michelle Gellar in the wake of seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
on the WB network.
20. David Church considers this split in the audience, “between film-savvy purists and a
more inexperienced youth audience” not just as a manifestation of the split between different
segments of the audience—between margin and mainstream—but also as the manifestation
of a “generation gap”: “Meanwhile, a generation gap between film-savvy purists and a more
inexperienced youth audience widens—but the recent films of directors like Romero and Roth
remind us of the progressive potential that is still very possible beneath so much gore and
exploitative mayhem in popular films consumed by people on all sides of the divide” (David
Church, Offline.com).
21. According to Kleffel, the Nixon administration gave rise to the horror boom surrounding
The Exorcist in the 1970s; the Reagan years oversaw the phenomenal boom of horror fiction that
brought us Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Anne Rice; and George W. Bush can take credit
for new genre-defying horror writers like Palahniuk himself (interestingly enough, the literary
horror boom came to an end when a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was in the White House: further
study of Kleffel’s theory is advised). For the full interview, see Rick Kleffel, “Chuck Palahniuk,”
The Agony Column, September 7, 2003. http://trashotron.com/agony/indexes/audio_interview_
index.htm.

Scholars and fans alike tend to think about film genres as products of
national film industries and as expressions of national culture. We talk about the
American musical, the Hollywood Western, the Japanese samurai film, or the Chinese martial arts film. Yet as film industries around the world undergo the processes of economic globalization, they are gradually becoming less national and
more transnational in everything from the workers they hire to the audiences they
cater to. Commercial genres are among the best places to observe this process of
transnationalization taking place, as bodies of visual and narrative conventions once
strongly identified with one or perhaps two national film industries are appropriated, revised, and remade across the globe. In recent years the once unambiguously
“American” horror film has been challenged—in the marketplace and in fans’ affections—by films that have been profoundly shaped by Hollywood, both directly and
indirectly, but that cannot be classified as American in any simple way. Like other
genres that are undergoing a similar process, the horror film is becoming—and is
being recognized—as a transnational genre. Today, scholars of genre are increasingly extending the geographic scope of their analyses and focusing attention on
the transnational inflections within American martial arts films, German and Thai
Westerns, Korean monster movies, crime and war films, and Hong Kong gangster and action films.1 To truly understand the changes that are taking place in the
horror film today, therefore, we have to extend our critical vision beyond the films
themselves. We must pay attention to the changes taking place in film industries
around the world and recognize how the transnationalization of the genre is a function of the larger transnationalization of the industries that produce these films.
The very nature of genre films—their structural balance of repetition and variation, rigidity and flexibility, familiarity and innovation—makes them ideal candidates
for this process of transnationalization. Because of their formulaic construction and
3

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their derivation from other films, they do not demand from viewers a deep familiarity with a foreign culture or cinematic tradition, but rather a more easily acquired
mastery of a recurring set of conventions. Modular in construction, genre films also
localize well. Their “Lego pieces”—as Jeanine Basinger calls the recurring bits of
story, setting, and character out of which genre films are composed—are often ideologically neutral, capable of expressing a range of meanings depending on how they
are arranged and how they resonate with the world outside the film. Once absorbed
into a new film culture, these Lego pieces can be combined by local filmmakers in
fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings.
Hollywood today is a global film industry headquartered in Los Angeles, not
an American one. Hollywood, of course, has operated globally since the 1910s. But
its global reach expanded dramatically in the 1980s, as the forces of economic globalization—including the opening up of formerly socialist economies, the worldwide
reduction in trade barriers, the diffusion of digital technologies—combined to create a globally integrated capitalist economy. Suddenly, the Hollywood studios—now
the prime content providers for global media conglomerates—were scooping up the
lion’s share of viewers and box office earnings in most countries around the world.
Today, Hollywood’s working parameters—its financing, its stories, its workers, its
production and post-production locations, its markets, its profits—are increasingly
global in scope. And Americans are a shrinking sector of its audience: in 2007, the
twenty-three highest-grossing Hollywood films earned $4 billion in the United
States—and $6 billion overseas (Hollinger).
Filmmakers around the world, unprepared for the onslaught of Hollywood
films that accompanied the economic transformations of globalization, were stunned
by declines in their industries’ box office revenues and the subsequent drops in film
production rates. But many of them didn’t stay stunned and they didn’t accept the
domination of their markets by Hollywood as a given of the new economic order.
Instead, they began searching for ways they could globalize their own industries and
move beyond the limits of the nation in their thinking about production, markets,
and financing. They also began to reconsider the terms of their relationship with
Hollywood, and many filmmakers came to embrace the idea of both collaborating with Hollywood and competing more vigorously against it. Hollywood’s global
expansion and other industries’ responses to it constitute the material terrain on
which the transnationalization of the horror film (and other genres as well) has
taken place.
In what follows I want to explore four different ways in which we can see the
transnational dimensions of the contemporary horror film, paying particular attention to relations between Hollywood and its counterpart industries in Asia.2 This
is not an exhaustive catalog of all the ways in which the horror film is becoming
transnational. But it is a broad enough overview to suggest the scope of the changes

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that are taking place, and to show how the national and cultural identity of any
given horror film is something to be interrogated rather than assumed.

R e ma k e s
Hollywood remakes of Asian films are perhaps the best-known example of the transnationalization of the horror film. Roy Lee, the so-called remake
king whom Variety identifies as “the man who brought Asia’s horror film culture
to America,” has been the engine driving this trend (Frater). He has brokered the
sale of rights to remake numerous Asian films to American producers, earning
himself and his company, Vertigo Entertainment, producer credits in the process
(Friend). Lee began the process with J-horror films in the early 2000s, with remakes
of Ringu (1998) (remade as The Ring in 2002), Ju-on (2003) (remade as The Grudge
in 2004), and Dark Water (2002) (remade with the same title in 2005). He has since
expanded into other parts of Asia. He brokered the remake of The Eye (2002) from
Hong Kong (remade under the same title in 2008), Sigaw (2004) from the Philippines (remade as The Echo, 2008), and A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) (remade as The
Uninvited, 2009) and Jungdok (2002) (remade as Possession, 2009), both from South
Korea. Lee has turned his attention toward Europe as well, arranging the remake of
Spanish film [Rec] (2007) (new title: Quarantined, 2008).
Remakes are one of the primary reasons that global Hollywood inspires such
loathing among admirers of Asian cinema. They tend to see these films as proof that
studio executives think only in terms of “product” ready to fill their global pipelines
aided by an ever-increasing number of media platforms. American fans of Asian
and horror cinema often condemn these remakes for homogenizing the distinctive creative visions of Asian directors (Hendrix) and as the product of a racism
so entrenched in Hollywood that producers feel they have no choice but to replace
Asian faces with white ones (Larsen).
While there is truth in these criticisms, they do not tell the whole story.
Remakes are part of the larger process of the globalization of Hollywood’s labor
pools. Instead of limiting themselves to workers in Los Angeles or even the whole
United States, producers of Hollywood movies today regularly combine American
workers with above- and below-the-line workers drawn from film industries around
the world. In buying the remake rights to a film, Hollywood studios are buying the
labor of the original film’s screenwriters. This is one way for Hollywood to save time
and money. And while “cost cutting” and “Hollywood” don’t often appear in the same
sentence these days, saving money does have its attractions in an industry where the
average cost of shooting and releasing a film now hovers around $100 million. It is
generally cheaper and faster to buy the rights to an already-polished script than it is

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to commission American screenwriters to draft a script from scratch and endlessly
rewrite it. In buying the remakes rights, Hollywood is also buying a script that has
been test-marketed: if a genre script attracted audiences in Hong Kong, or Japan, or
Korea, chances are that it will do the same in the United States. And while racism
is certainly alive and well in Hollywood, Americans are not the only ones playing
the remake game: Asian filmmakers have joined in, too. The Ring Virus (1999), for
example, is a Korean remake of the Japanese Ringu, complete with Korean actors,
dialogue, and setting. This suggests that the desire for cultural specificity and familiar actors also play important roles in the remake process.
Remakes of Asian horror films can serve the interests of Asian filmmakers as
well as those of producers in Hollywood. Not only do remake rights provide a new
revenue stream for the original film’s producers, the remakes themselves are serving
as vehicles through which Asian directors and actors find entrée into Hollywood.
In other words, remakes allow Hollywood to draw on a transnational labor pool of
actors and directors as well as writers. Takashi Shimizu, the Japanese director of the
original Ju-On films, went on to direct the Hollywood remake The Grudge (2004)
as well as the Hollywood-originated second installment in the series, The Grudge 2
(2006). Similarly, Hideo Nakata, the Japanese director of the original Ringu films,
directed The Ring 2 (2005). In a further step into Hollywood’s mainstream, Nakata
and his producing partner Taka Ichise have signed on to make 20th Century Fox’s
Inhuman, an original film that is not part of a Japanese-originated franchise.3 For
Nakato and Ichise, the English-language remakes served as stepping-stones to
their new roles as producer and director of original Hollywood films (Hazelton).
Similarly Hong Kong directors Oxide and Danny Pang, who directed the original
The Eye, made their Hollywood debut with an original horror film, The Messengers
(2007) (Yi).
From one perspective, this transnationalization of labor pools can be seen
as an aggressive, or even imperialist, act by Hollywood. The studios are poaching
the best talent from other film industries, which have invested their own limited
resources in developing the skills of these high-end workers, and in the process
are weakening the ability of these industries to compete with global Hollywood in
their own domestic markets. From a different perspective, however, the transnationalization of labor pools gives non-American directors and producers access to
much larger resources and markets than their home industries can provide. Working on Hollywood movies can also serve as an education in new production processes, technologies, and management strategies, the lessons of which these workers often carry back to their home industries. Today, the move into Hollywood is
often more of a temporary sojourn than a permanent emigration, with the backand-forth movement between industries furthering the transnational dimension of
contemporary cinema.

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Remakes severely problematize familiar notions of cinematic style and cultural identity. When Hollywood remakes a Korean horror film, how much of a distinctly Korean cultural or aesthetic sensibility adheres to the new version? When
Japanese directors make films in Hollywood, how much of a distinctly Japanese
style do they bring to their American scripts and actors? DreamWorks’ remake
of the Korean Tale of Two Sisters is clearly a Hollywood horror film, but is it an
American horror film?

Lo c a l L a n g uag e Co - P r o d u c t i o n s
A somewhat less visible category of transnational horror film is the Hollywood “local language” co-production. Beginning about ten years ago, studio executives started to notice that audiences in many parts of the world were showing a
renewed interest in locally made films. This interest has been steadily increasing,
to the point that in 2006 local films took in over 50 percent of the box office earnings in China, Korea, and Japan—markets that once belonged to Hollywood. Viewers, it turned out, like to see their own stories and hear their own languages up on
the screen, even as they also enjoy the English-language blockbusters churned out
by Hollywood. In response to this renewed competition, the studios began to set
up specialty divisions and enter into partnerships with overseas film companies to
make “local” films. Today, virtually all Hollywood studios have overseas operations
and are making films in Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Arabic, French, and other languages—films that are tailored to the
tastes and cultures of local markets. The studio typically takes charge of distribution in the local market and will plug the film into its global distribution network if
executives in Los Angeles believe that it has broad export potential (Dawtrey). The
studios have also stepped up their acquisitions of local films that they had no hand
in producing, distributing these films in their own domestic markets and sometimes
in select export markets as well. The Hollywood studios have thus found ways to
invest in and profit from resurgent film industries around the world.
Horror films have been among the more successful local-language studio productions. In Japan, Warner Bros. had one of the first local-language successes with
the Death Note films, a manga-derived franchise about a supernatural notebook that
kills anyone whose name is written in it. Warner Bros. co-produced Death Note
(2006) and Death Note: The Last Name (2006) with Nippon Network Television
Corporation (NTV) and took charge of distributing the films in Japan, where
together they earned a very respectable $65 million (Gray). The Death Note films
make visible one of the paradoxes of contemporary world cinema: as local film
industries strive to reclaim their own domestic markets from Hollywood, one of the

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most successful strategies for doing so is to enter into a partnership with Hollywood.
In 2006, the year that both Death Note films performed so well at the Japanese box
office, the Japanese film industry reclaimed a majority share of its own domestic
market from Hollywood for the first time in twenty-one years (Schilling).
Local-language productions muddy the distinction between Hollywood films
and local films. Hollywood has become such an integral player in overseas film
industries at the level of production, distribution, and exhibition that the idea of
competition between national industries is coming to seem quaintly outmoded.
Hollywood studios earn money when their English-language blockbuster films do
well in Japan; they are also starting to earn money when local Japanese films perform
well in theaters, both at home and abroad. While the content of a local–language
film may have wholly local origins, one must ask if the participation of a Hollywood
studio shapes its expressive form, particularly its narrative form, given Hollywood’s
adherence to a relatively strict body of conventions regarding characterization, clarity, and structure. The Death Note films are clearly Japanese films, based on Japanese source material and using Japanese actors and director; and yet, given Warner
Brothers’ involvement in their production, are they also American horror films?

R e g i o n a l i z at i o n
One transnational alternative for local filmmakers who do not want to collaborate with a Hollywood studio (or who do not have that option) is the regional
co-production. The Hong Kong-based Applause Pictures is a prime example of
how some film companies outside the United States are pushing to regionalize their
industries as one way to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of filmmaking.
Founded by the Hong Kong producer and director Peter Chan in 2000 amid the
slow-motion collapse of the Hong Kong industry, Applause Pictures makes commercial films that draw on the human and material resources of multiple industries,
which, taken together, are greater than any one Asian industry can provide. In doing
so the company seeks to improve the quality of its films and boost their earning
power by attracting viewers in multiple markets, each of whom is drawn by the participation of familiar actors, directors, and other name talent. For Chan, the goal of
regionalization is to compete with Hollywood on a more equal footing by creating a
larger “domestic” market for Asian films. “In Hong Kong,” says Chan,
the market is only 6 million, which is too small to support even independent
films. But if we add the population of Korea, which has 40 million; Thailand,
which has 60 million; Japan, which has 150 million; Taiwan, which has 20
million; and Singapore, which has 3 million—the total population is around

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300 million, which is even bigger than the U.S. domestic market. Hollywood
films are successful because they have a strong domestic market, and they can
produce a large volume of films. If Asian films have a larger domestic market,
we can do exactly the same thing. (Po)
By making films that relate to Asia as a single regional market rather than a collection of small national markets, Chan hopes that he and other Asian filmmakers can
establish an economic foundation for their industries equivalent to that enjoyed by
Hollywood.
Applause Pictures produces films from across the genre map, including musicals
(Perhaps Love [2001]), war films (The Warlords [2007]), dramas (Jan Dara [2001]),
and, of course, horror. Three Extremes (2004) is one example of its transnational
approach to the genre. It is an omnibus film composed of three shorts, each one
directed by a popular and respected director from a different Asian country: Fruit
Chan of Hong Kong (“Dumplings”), Park Chan-wook of South Korea (“Cut”), and
Takashi Miike of Japan (“Box”). Because each segment also employs the language
and actors from the director’s home country, the film automatically appeals to a
three-country market. The film aims, however, to extend that regional market into
the future: by exposing viewers in one country to the talents and styles of two other
film industries, it hopes to increase the willingness of viewers to watch more films
from those countries in the future. Applause Pictures’ model of regionalization is
becoming more common as individual Asian film industries become stronger and
the idea of successfully competing with Hollywood in their own markets becomes
less far-fetched. This process of regionalization is bringing together film industries
that have historically had very few ties. The horror film Muoi (2007), for example,
about a Korean writer looking for new material in Vietnam, is the first co-production between these two countries (Paquet, January 4, 2007).
These pan-Asian films are not “American” in terms of their content, production, financing, or distribution; there is no direct studio involvement at any level.
But their very pan-Asianness is shaped by Hollywood, insofar as it is a calculated
response to Hollywood’s overwhelming presence in Asia and part of a careful strategy for competing with Hollywood. Is it possible to think of these horror films,
with their multiethnic Asian casts and multiple languages, as somehow, peripherally
American?

Ta k i n g A i m at t h e U.S. Ma r k e t
One final form of transnational cinema is the film wholly made by one industry
and aimed at a specific export market by using the language, actors, and locations

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of that market. As film markets mature—that is, approach the saturation point
in terms of number of theaters and attendance rates and thus experience slower
rates of growth—they turn to export markets as the arena for economic expansion.
The United States is the prime example of a mature film market, and Hollywood
today regularly aims its films at a mass global market: think of all those spectacleheavy and star-laden franchise films that perform well in almost every market in
the world.
But Hollywood also makes films that cater to specific national markets, such
as Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). This is a Japanese-language film
produced by Warner Bros. without any international partners. It features Japanese
stars, is based on Japanese sources, and tells the story of a major World War II battle
from the Japanese point of view. Why would a studio make such a film? There are
a number of reasons, including Eastwood’s desire to make a companion piece to
Flags of Our Fathers, which narrated the same events from an American perspective,
and thus to capture the experience of a battle in greater complexity. And perhaps
the film expresses Americans’ unease with the war in Iraq and the growing sense
of being caught up in a war that is not as morally black and white as we initially
believed. Still, market consideration undoubtedly played a role in the decision to
make the film, as well: Japan is Hollywood’s single-biggest export market. Letters
from Iwo Jima was aimed directly at Japanese viewers and it hit its mark: the film
earned over 60 percent of its total earnings in Japan, more than three times as much
as it earned in the United States.
As other film markets around the world mature they, too, are looking to foreign markets to increase their revenues. For these relatively small industries, finding
export markets can be the key to maintaining a solid stake in their own domestic
markets. Growing revenues are necessary to raise film production budgets to levels
beyond what their domestic market alone can support, and these big budgets are
required to make films with high-enough production values that they can compete
against imported Hollywood blockbusters at home.
South Korea is one industry that, facing market maturation at home, is starting
to make films aimed at specific foreign markets, most remarkably the United States.
The Korean turn toward export markets began with the Korea Wave in the early
2000s, when Korean films and TV serials made for the domestic market began
finding substantial audiences in other Asian countries, such as Japan, China, and
Vietnam (as well as in more far-flung markets like Egypt). As the production values
of Korean films began earning praise around the world, including in the United
States, and as the popularity of these culturally Korean films showed signs of waning in Japan, their single largest export market, Korean film companies began to
consider the radical idea of making films explicitly for the U.S. market, which is
notoriously closed to foreign-language films (Yang). Instead of making films with

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Korean actors, dialogue, and settings that would enter the market visibly marked as
foreign films, Korean companies decided to start financing and producing Englishlanguage films with American actors and settings that would be culturally similar
to the local product. Shim Hyung-rae’s Dragon Wars (2007) (released as D-War in
the United States) was one of the earliest instances of this strategy. A big-budget
film about a dragon that wreaks havoc on Los Angeles—and thus a horror film
in the broadest sense of the term—this English-language film starring Jason Behr
and Amanda Brooks was shot primarily in California, although a Korean company
produced the high-quality special effects. Like Letters from Iwo Jima, the film hit
its target audience: in addition to topping Korea’s annual box office chart, it earned
over $10 million in the United States, which is the highest return for any Korean
movie released in the United States.
Other Korean media companies are pursuing an alternative approach to cracking the U.S. market by financing the production of low-budget English-language
and American-set genre films directed by Korean Americans. Eschewing D-War’s
strategy of aiming at a mainstream American market (the film was released on over
two thousand screens), these companies are seeking to enter the United States via
the ethnic niche market. CJ Entertainment, the largest entertainment company in
Korea, produced West 32nd Street (2007), an ethnic gangster film set in Manhattan’s Korean-American business district and directed by Michael Kang (The Motel
[2005]) and starring John Cho (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle [2004]).
Another big Korean media company, iHQ, is producing American Zombie (2007), a
horror mockumentary directed by Grace Lee (The Grace Lee Project [2005]) about a
community of un-dead living in Los Angeles (Harvey; Paquet, February 13, 2007).
How should we categorize the national and cultural identity of these films?
Are they Korean? American? Korean American? These films raise the possibility
of cultural identity being determined by consumption rather than production. Are
these Korean-financed and -produced films really American films because they are
aimed at American audiences? And finally, what is it about the horror film that
makes it so open to transnationalization?
Some genres, of course, transnationalize better than others. Films whose
meanings depend heavily on dialogue or culturally specific social codes, such as the
romantic or situation comedy, tend to be less mobile. In contrast, films that produce
pleasure primarily through visual spectacle and simple, archetypal storytelling have
a better chance of crossing national boundaries. It is no surprise, then, that physical
comedy (think Charlie Chaplin), Westerns (think Sergio Leone), and the various
forms of action films—including martial arts, crime, gangster, adventure, spy narratives—have undergone the most extensive transnationalization. The conventions
and the appeal of the horror film, however, are somewhat different from these other
transnational genres. While certain subgenres, such as the monster film, emphasize

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visual spectacle, the horror genre as a whole is perhaps defined less by what it puts
on screen than by the visceral feelings it produces in the viewer: suspense, dread,
anxiety, fear, revulsion, surprise, shock. While the cinematic means that produce
these responses vary widely, from Hollywood’s bloody slashers to Japan’s ethereal
ghosts, the emotions themselves are foundationally human and thus common
across cultures. Crucially, these emotions are best stimulated through nonverbal
cinematic means. In addition, the genre’s transnationalization may also be facilitated by the fact that it was an international genre from the outset. Before crossborder exchanges became quite commonplace, many industries around the world
had developed their own distinct traditions of horror cinema based on their unique
aesthetic traditions (Germany), spiritual beliefs (Indonesia), historical experiences
( Japan), or political anxieties (the United States). Horror’s transnational turn was
perhaps facilitated as much by globalization’s drive toward heterogenization as well
as toward homogenization: the desire among filmmakers and audiences to discover
new means of stimulating those familiar emotions. Foreign horror films offered a
tantalizing mix of the familiar and the new.
As a result, the national and cultural identity of many contemporary horror
films is increasingly open to question. Not even the criteria by which such an identity might be determined are clear. What is it that makes a film American or Korean
or Japanese or Vietnamese? Is it the financing? The production company? The
director? The stars? The language? The visual and narrative styles? The themes? The
markets? Even if we could pinpoint the sources of a film’s identity, can we really disentangle these threads from one another? This question of cultural identity extends,
of course, beyond the realm of genre films and into questions about audiences and
national culture more generally, all of which are becoming less culturally coherent. In an era when we are all eating one another’s food, listening to one another’s
music, attending one another’s universities, and watching one another’s antics on
You Tube, to what extent can any of us be said to possess a distinct, singular, and
neatly bounded national cultural identity? The horror film is thus one instance of
globalization’s more general drive toward an inescapable cultural hybridity.

N ot e s
1. See, for example, scholarly work by Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Ki, and Stephan Chan
Ching-kiu, eds., Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam, eds., Hong Kong Film,
Hollywood, and the New Global Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2007); David Desser, “Global
Noir: Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism,” Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 516–36; Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian
Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Tassilo Schneider, “Finding a New
Heimat in the Wild West: Karl May and the German Western of the 1960s,” Back in the Saddle

g lo b a l i z at i o n a n d t r a n s n at i o n a l u.s.- a s i a n g e n r e s

13

Again: New Essays on the Western, ed. Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (London: BFI,
1998), 141–59; Christina Klein, “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema,
or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho,” American Quarterly 60.4 (2008): 871–98;
and David Scott Diffrient, “Han’gul Heroism: Cinematic Spectable and the Postwar Cultural
Politics of Red Muffler,” South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National
Cinema, ed. Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2005), 151–83.
2. I focus on Asian industries both because they are the subject of my current research and
because they have been among the most creative in their responses to globalization’s pressures.

Through the postwar period of the twentieth century, French cinema maintained a
viable film industry complete with indigenous popular genres and stars and a highprofile auteurist tradition. In all these aspects, it successfully maintained a sense
of national identity. However, that identity is increasingly in flux due not only to
internal ideological struggles, the weight of repressed history, and pressure from the
increasingly multicultural French population and French culture, but also to global
influences (like Hollywood) and transnational developments in the film industry.
As Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden point out, national sovereignty no longer
wields the regulatory power it did in the last century, and this fact is changing the
nature, purpose, and reception of films being made, exported, and consumed in the
global marketplace: “The impossibility of assigning a fixed national identity to much
cinema reflects the dissolution of any stable connection between a film’s place of
production and/or setting and the nationality of its markers and performers” (1).
Shifting borders and geopolitical climates were marked by the fall of the Berlin
wall, the establishment, consolidation, and expansion of the European Union, while
digital media and other technologies that allow films to be reproduced and delivered
immediately and on a wide scale flourished. In response to these trends, cinematic
nationalism has perhaps coalesced—more than ever before—around the figure of
the auteur, who was both the epitome and standard-bearer of his nation’s identity as
it was perceived by the world. Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard
produced narratives identified as essentially or typically French.
However, in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, certain “hybridizing tendencies” (Ezra and Rowden’s phrase) have reduced or effaced
national insularity in film, and though the “transnational” may transcend the
“national,” it remains indebted to it. Hybridity problematizes the concept of foreign
film, but the global has also impacted American film and its own often imperialistic
identity. If the “performance of Americanness is increasingly becoming a ‘universal’
or ‘universalizing’ characteristic in world cinema” (Ezra and Rowden 2), American
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cinema is also increasingly flavored by non-American matter and actors. A glance
at the major categories of the 2007 Academy Awards reveals a globalizing impulse
even in mainstream American cinema: Daniel Day-Lewis (British), Best Actor;
Marion Cotillard (French), Best Actress; Javier Bardem (Spanish), Best Supporting
Actor; Tilda Swinton (Scottish), Best Supporting Actress; Ratatouille (set in Paris,
co-directed by Jan Pinkeva), Best Animated Feature Film.
In an effort to conquer world markets, several French directors have traded
on their success at home, revisited popular genres, and won acclaim in Hollywood.
Young Alexandre Aja is one such success story. His career provides an example of
how globalization in the film industry allows foreign directors to succeed in the
“national” arena (Aja’s earliest efforts are French language films starring French
actors, settings, stylistic conventions, and roots), and then conquer the “global”
world. He did this by pursuing a popular genre not as readily available to him in his
native France, adopting transnational textual strategies, and “naturalizing” himself
as an American filmmaker. As part of the “splat pack,” a new generation of filmmakers who do not shy away from gratuitous gore and disturbing images, Aja also
provides the supreme example of the cross-cultural nature of contemporary horror,
which seems to have entered the global marketplace as an exotic newcomer with
hopes of making it its permanent home.

I n t r o d u c t i o n: Aj a a n d t h e E y e
Aja received international attention in 2003 with his award-winning film
High Tension. Hybrid in its use of language, freely mixing French and English dialogue and featuring French, Italian, and English pop songs, High Tension would
seem to owe something to an emerging cinematic genre dubbed “torture porn” by a
reproachful mainstream media (the term is usually applied to films such as Saw and
Hostel in which the primary emphasis seems to be on watching the graphic suffering
of others). In contrast to the grittiness of its American counterparts, however, High
Tension has an arresting beauty, featuring stylish camera work, poignant montage,
and haunting musical arrangements along with the mandatory bloodletting. The
film, which features a plucky (and deadly) antiheroine, was influenced stylistically
by the giallo film, but certainly owes something to the French film movement of
the 1980s known as Cinéma du look, with its slick, glossy style, elevation of image
over substance, and focus on young, alienated characters recalling the marginalized
youth of Francois Mitterand’s France (notable examples of Cinéma du look include
Diva [1981] and Nikita [1990]).
High Tension caught the eye of Wes Craven, who dubbed Aja “a director’s
director” and worked with him on the remake of his 1977 film, The Hills Have

Eyes. Craven praised Aja’s ability to build suspense, his visual style, his energy and
pace, and his use of sound (Craven). This was a significant moment in the story
of transnational horror, as the established master of the American brand of horror passed the torch to his young counterpart. Aja brings his European influences
to the genre, employing a variety of catchy styles of world music in counterpoint
to the images he creates, building suspense by drawing upon horror codes and
conventions established by Alfred Hitchcock and his followers, and turning the
screen into a richly colored bloody canvas. He also satisfies gore-hounds with an
unflinching portrayal of brutality, something resisted in Europe, as Aja explains in
an interview:
in Europe there is no horror movie. It’s very hard to make a slasher or gory
movie. There is no audience for that. I think the main difference between
Europe and the U.S. is that there is a kind of freedom. We don’t have this
Puritanism problem. We don’t have this stupid, silly problem with nudity.
On the other hand we have this problem with violence. It’s very hard to get
very far. A movie like The House on the Left [sic] would be very hard to do in
Europe. Like High Tension was. It was not very easy to do and find money to
make the movie because it was so violent. We don’t have a nudity problem,
the only problem we have is too much violence. To give you an example, The
Devil’s Rejects, which I saw before I was leaving for L.A. It’s a great movie. It’s
an amazing movie but it’d be very hard to do in Europe. Because it’s very violent and traumatic but sometimes you are on the side of the killers and that’d
be something they’d have a problem with. (Aja)
Aja seems to have found a home in America, or at least a workplace. Like many
directors currently working in the field of transnational horror, he has recently completed a remake. He has directed the remake of a Korean horror film, Into the Mirror
(Geoul sokeuro, 2003), called Mirrors, starring the popular American actor Kiefer
Sutherland. He is also capitalizing on an American techno-trend in a remake of the
1978 horror-comedy, Piranha, slated for release in 2009 as Piranha 3-D.
Aja enjoys box office success and freedom in Hollywood despite clashes with
the MPAA board, as in the case of High Tension. One reason for his appeal and
something that sets him apart from the rest of the splat pack is his sense of composition and style. He is certainly aware of the mannerisms of the filmmakers
that preceded him, but his work is not merely derivative. His films are hybrid in
several senses, making him a synecdoche for the globalization of cinema, stylistically as well as in the marketplace. Examples of his idiosyncratic style are his use of
point-of-view editing and the camera eye to build a peculiar sense of suspense and
intensity. His handling of the camera eye follows a unique visual rhetoric, and his

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appropriation of the ocular effects encoded in horror films has something of the
quality of a fingerprint.
Aja’s films emphasize several aspects of the gaze. After all, Over the Rainbow
(1997)—one of Aja’s earliest works—begins with a voyeur stalking and killing a
woman observing herself in a mirror. The Hills Have Eyes (2006) provokes gooseflesh precisely because the mutant family is always watching its “normal” counterpart; the film ends, in fact, with an extreme long shot from the rocky landscape of
the New Mexico hills, evidence that “they are still watching.” Mirrors (2008) enacts
the inescapability and violence inherent in the reflected gaze. The plot of High Tension turns on a voyeuristic moment involving a shower scene designed in clear allusion to Hitchcock, another director obsessed with the implications of the voyeuristic camera. Time and again, Aja uses the eye as a rich site of (sometimes conflicting)
meanings. Perhaps his genius lies in the fact that no one theoretical paradigm contains these meanings: he uses the eye metacinematically; he knowledgeably alludes
to iconic scenes, not all of them from horror film history (like Luis Buñuel’s slitopen eye in Un Chien Andalou); he rewrites the philosophy of the gaze, demoting
the eye in the hierarchy of senses and thus following the theoretical lead of critic and
philosopher Georges Bataille; he links the eye to rape; and he celebrates the eye as
an insurgent force against the repressive symbolic order. The range of deployments
of this single trope in Aja creates a mirroring effect described by Noël Carroll: viewers feel vulnerable, shudder, and experience visceral revulsion at what they see. They
shrink and contract, like the characters whose fear they witness, to avoid contact
with unclean creatures in the mind’s eye, and they experience paralysis in conjunction with an urge to flee. This mirroring effect is a key feature of the horror film for
Carroll; the monsters, the images, the body parts, and the victims all make horror
films frightening, but it is the eyes of Aja’s viewers watching eyes watching horror
that make his films monstrous and uncanny (Carroll, Philosophy 17–18).
A salient characteristic of Aja’s films, the ocular may be key to his international
success. The eye is an archetype in cinema, and especially in horror films the world
over. Note, for example, The Eye (2008), a remake of the Asian film Gin gwai (2002);
Bigas Luna’s Anguish (Spain, 1987); Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (U.K., 1960). Central texts in world literature—Oedipus Rex, King Lear, “The Tell-Tale Heart”—fixate
upon the eye as a site where the dramas of guilt, terror, and castration anxiety are
enacted. It’s no mistake that the medium of film has seized upon its power. Long
ago, before the slashers of the 1980s lumbered across the movie screens of America,
S. S. Prawer noted the prominence of the eye in horror cinema and the various roles
it plays: “Within the face it is of course the eye which leads most directly to where
we live—and the human eye has, indeed, played an especially important part in the
terror film” (75). He speculates about the ambiguous nature of the cinematic eye,
which may reveal in frightening close-ups an unbalanced and distorted mind, or may

mirror a sad or terrified soul, or possibly evoke squeamishness and revulsion in the
viewer by virtue of its vulnerability and texture. In the final chapter of Men, Women,
and Chainsaws, “The Eye of Horror,” Carol Clover offers an exhaustive list of horror
films that feature eyes in their titles or images of eyes on their box covers, posters, and
promotional materials, claiming, “Horror privileges eyes because, more crucially than
any other kind of cinema, it is about eyes” (167). She then qualifies, “More particularly,
it is about eyes watching horror” (167). Clover’s metacinematic turn helps explain the
final cause of horror, its effect on the viewer: horror is not, strictly speaking, induced
by the thing itself (monster, mutilated body, etc.); rather, horror takes effect when a
viewer watches a viewer watching horror. Clover implies that our horror depends on
our identification with some aspect of what we see and on a vulnerability we share
with either the eye of the victim or of the killer. But there is perhaps a suggestion that
the informed viewer is embedded in the language and gestures of the horror film and
can, therefore, articulate a certain understanding of the genre.
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the cinematic urtext of slasher films, exerts an anxiety of influence over all directors who follow. The forty-five minutes leading-up to
the shower had centered on Marion Crane’s ill-fated plot to embezzle money and
join her lover, and her murder less than halfway through the film must have shocked
and alienated viewers. The ocular horror of the sequence is arguably what makes
it iconic. The flow of eye-like images begins with a view down into the circular
motion of a flushing toilet, moves to a low-angle shot of an eye-like shower head,
the screaming O of Marion’s mouth during her stabbing, back to the shower head,
and then to water circling the drain in the bathtub, which dissolves into the lifeless,
staring eye of the victim, the focal point of a slow zoom out.
The hybrid film Anguish (aka Angustia) explores as fully as possible the metacinematic notion of ocular horror. The initial plotline features John Pressman
(Michael Lerner), an orderly in an optometrist’s office and a caretaker for a collection of eyeballs in jars at a teaching hospital. John is driven by his mother (Zelda
Rubenstein), who controls him psychically and drives him to murder people and
cut out their eyes. At one point, Aja has his camera pull back out of the screen to
focus on a sickened, terrified, and fascinated audience watching John’s drama, a film
called The Mommy. Soon, a seemingly hypnotized psychotic (Angel Jove) who has
seen The Mommy one too many times begins murdering people in the theater. His
actions are mirrored on the screen. Plots dovetail. As one of the survivors of the
ordeal in the theater lies in a hospital bed, John from The Mommy enters her room
in search of more eyeballs: “Like the doctor said, it’s all in your imagination. I really
don’t exist.” The closing credits roll on a screen within the film as a theatrical audience clears out.
Anguish is indebted to Psycho on many levels, but it remains an important horror film in its own right because it reifies horror film’s assault on vision and places

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viewers in a mise en abyme of visual identification and terror. Wes Craven famously
offers a self-reflexive horror film in Scream (1996), which features a horror fan/victim who quickly realizes that the film she is preparing to watch is one in which she,
herself, must perform. The opening sequence in which Casey (Drew Barrymore) is
menaced and eventually butchered by a crank phone caller demonstrates the centrality of the eyes to horror. Casey flirts with the caller as she makes popcorn and
prepares to watch a horror movie. After the caller reveals that he is watching her
every move and threatens to “gut [her] like a fish,” she gazes through the peephole
of her door, and the viewer gets, as Casey does, a distorted view of an empty porch.
When she asks, desperately, “What do you want?” she gets the horrifying answer:
“To see what your insides look like.” Soon, she will see what her boyfriend’s insides
look like as he sits, eviscerated, on the back porch because she missed a “game show”
question about Friday the 13th. Craven subverts viewers’ expectations in this film, as
Hitchcock did before him, by having the bankable actress playing Casey, a seeming
prototype for “the final girl” of the slasher genre, killed within the first ten minutes.
Like Patty (Talia Paul), John’s “final victim” in Anguish, Casey prepares to watch a
horror movie but is unable to grasp the fact that she is in one. Horror comes upon
the heroine when she realizes that she, the watcher, is now the watched; the emphasis on watching, an impulse of cinematic horror, has certainly left its mark on this
opening sequence.

T h e Voy e u r i st i c C am e r a E y e
Aja, born in 1978, is a student of American horror, especially of Craven’s
work, and so is fluent in the language of the genre. He understands the centrality of
the eye to horror and his deployment of the eye and the gaze has been central to his
art from his very first effort, a ten-minute film entitled Over the Rainbow. Despite
its brief running time, Over the Rainbow is filled with techniques and interests that
Aja will explore in his later, full-length films. Over the Rainbow is filmed entirely in
black and white with a handheld camera and steadicam. It is experimental and selfreflexive, satirizing film noir with its sordid city atmosphere, shady characters, nightfor-night shooting, and twisted plots dealing with misdirected passion and violent
crime. Aja also satirizes cinema vérité through the film’s visual style and faux investigative journalistic technique. Comic and grotesque, its dominant features involve
a self-conscious, roving camera eye and point-of-view editing. It is unmistakably
a French film: French is the only language used, it is set in France, and it features
French music and conventional French character types. The film is available only
as a streaming video, allowing it to reach a world market without corporate commercial distribution.

In Over the Rainbow, Aja’s editing skill, particularly his use of point-of-view
editing, establishes the horror of the cinematic look. At times, Aja’s point/glance
shot shows a well-defined watcher and an ensuing reaction shot offers a cause-andeffect explanation for the events filmed. At other times, though, the looker is offscreen or the point/glance shot cut altogether, creating what Catherine Zimmer
calls “a cinematic organ of vision” (36). This sinister voyeurism described by Zimmer
lies at the heart of the horror effect for Aja. For example, the opening sequence of
Over the Rainbow, which traces the unsteady vision of a roving gaze from out of the
darkness and into the light of a canal toward an unsuspecting woman later identified as “Madame Nero,” dispenses with the point/glance shot altogether.1 Ghostly,
ethereal music creates a mysterious aura, and the distorted sounds of the woman’s humming as the eye approaches create an effect of distance, as in a dream or
a memory. The eye is positioned before the mirror, but we still see no subject, only
the woman’s shock at being watched, and we hear her terrified scream as she turns
her cucumber-masked face toward her assailant.2 Continuity editing here gives way
to sudden montage as the woman’s scream merges with the escaping steam of the
pressure cooker and the ethereal music yields to the contrapuntal sound of French
comic music. The identity of the stalker with whom viewers are forced into identification remains a mystery. Zimmer complains that “the distinction between the
camera’s vision and the human eye is often elided” in cinematic discussions of voyeurism, and sets out to demonstrate that, since Peeping Tom, the camera eye might
be thought of as “embodied within its own phenomenological specificity and its own
particularly embodied form of voyeurism” (35–36). The result of the look of this
unknown watcher with whom we watch is the sensation of horror—made possible,
in part, by technology developed initially from small, hand-held cameras. This category of shots that obscures the identity of the source becomes a source of paranoia
and dread in The Hills Have Eyes.

T h e M e tac i n e mat i c C am e r a E y e
Perhaps Aja was all the more attracted to this remake of the classic Wes
Craven film because, as the title indicates, viewers must submit relentlessly to
watching watchers watch victims. The variety of shots Aja uses destabilizes point
of view from beginning to end. The film begins with an extreme long shot of a barren desert in New Mexico in a region long ago devastated by nuclear testing. The
camera moves downward until it settles upon a babbling brook, which had partially
reflected the sky and sands surrounding it. It follows a fish that is netted by a person
in a HAZMAT suit. Suddenly there is a cut to a belated establishing shot—someone is watching the workers from a distance. A match cut to a medium shot seems

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to indicate that the watcher has moved closer. Then, viewers adopt the point of view
of the worker, seeing through his mask. The point/object is a hand-held Geiger
counter picking up large amounts of nuclear radiation. The worker scans the terrain,
when a distraught and tattered man crashes into him, crying for help. The point/
glance of the worker moves to the point/object view of the bloody interloper, who
then backs away as a look of horror comes over his face, which is now the point/
glance shot that picks up a new point/object—the worker. The point of a pick axe
strikes through the back of the HAZMAT helmet and emerges through the visor.
Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith) has impaled the government worker through the
chest, and repeatedly dashes the body against a rock; he quickly dispatches his companion and hauls them off, chained to the back of a pick-up truck.
An establishing shot of a lonely gas station follows the opening credits. The
camera eye moves along with a hapless gas station attendant (Tom Bower), circling
behind him. He clutches a rifle and looks about, nervously calling out, “Ruby?” The
camera eye trails along a dilapidated fence, which still supports a sign reading “No
Trespassing: United States Government Department of Energy,” finally lighting
upon the gas station attendant in a high angle shot. He will continue to be stalked
by an unseen presence until the horn of a car calls him away to the gas pumps—
the Carter family has arrived, American flag waving from the antenna of their station wagon. Filmmakers like Dario Argento and Brian De Palma established these
point-of-view shot arrangements and the fluid, stalking camera as conventions in
the horror genre, and Aja makes expert use of these mannerisms.
The Carter family will be subjected constantly to the eyes of their cannibalistic
counterparts, and the stalking begins at the gas station as Ruby (Laura Ortiz), a
young mutant girl, follows them around the grounds of the station. The Carters fall
under constant surveillance. After a blowout due to machinations by Lizard (Robert Joy) and Goggle (Ezra Buzzington), the family gathers to pray before the men
separate and go for help. A medium shot suddenly establishes the family gathering
in a circle as the young sister Brenda (Emile de Ravin) ironically remarks, “Ugh.
Thank God no one’s watching.” The camera moves further out and the field of vision
is now framed by the shape of a pair of binoculars. Guttural sounds are heard.
The following scene begins with the older sister, Lynn (Vinessa Shaw), breast
feeding her infant and talking with her mother. A jump cut to a long shot objectifies the group of women and their voices become distant. Obviously, they are being
“scoped-out” by the mutants. Later, when the mutants invade the trailer and rape
and kill two of the Carter women, Aja inserts a chilling detail: as Lizard holds
Lynn’s baby at gunpoint, he undoes her shirt and puts his face to her breast, as if
nursing. Was Lizard the watcher in the earlier scene? At film’s end, with the mutant
family seemingly dispatched, the Carter survivors engage in a group hug. Viewers
watch, but step-frame montage thrusts the viewpoint back to a long shot, then to an

extreme long shot. They are still watching. And that pronoun must remain ambiguous, because viewers are never quite sure who is watching along with them. The
vision of the camera eye in The Hills Have Eyes creates horror largely through the
positioning of the camera, the use of variable shots and editing techniques, and the
technological scopophilia of the camera eye. The sum of these techniques, however,
goes beyond the objectified image on the screen and becomes internalized and individualized in the audience. With The Hills Have Eyes, Aja has entered mainstream
Hollywood on the strength of his previous work in Europe. His eclectic style, which
could not find full expression in his homeland, has found affirmation in this remake
of a “canonical” American horror film.

The Eye as Insurgent Force
In his introduction to horror film, Rick Worland seeks the origins and
definition of the “splatter film,” a subgenre concerned with outlandishly grotesque
bodily destruction, dismemberment, and spurting blood. He cites Phantasm (1977)
as an early paradigm for the splatter film: “In a mortuary concealing the entrance to
the netherworld, a flying metallic ball sprouts blades to grind out the victim’s eyes,
blood spraying. The result was a literal “splatter” (107). The demonic ball in Phantasm actually latches onto the temples of victims and drills between the eyes, but the
blood certainly does spray. Aja splatters blood freely in his films, and his images are
as disturbing as those of any director working today (note, for example, High Tension, in which the killer cuts the hands off of Alex’s mother [Oana Pellea] and we
see an isolated shot of blood spraying against a white wall in an arterial spray scene
recalling Miike’s Ichi the Killer [2001]). Aja’s first full-length film, Furia (1999), while
not as brutal and bloody as his later work, participates in the tradition of ocular
horror; it is specifically about eyes, the rape of vision, and the limits of visuality.
From the repeated images of eyes, whether distanced by various lenses (still
photos, mirrors, screens, holes, slits, windows, open doorways), or represented by
circular objects (sun, moon, circular fans, radio knobs), to the heightened visual
language that defines the struggle to maintain artistic vision, Furia is emphatically
about the implications of looking, being looked at, and the physicality of the eye
itself. The film is in the mode of what Tom Conley calls a lecture de regard; that is,
a meditation on what it means to observe the film in accordance with the way it
stares back, leaving us “blinded and seduced by its images” (198). Furia takes place
in a barren, futuristic dystopia where the government brutally suppresses any sort
of artistic expression, particularly the art and practice of drawing. Amid this infertile wasteland, the story of intrigue and forbidden love between two artists takes
place. Théo (Stanislas Merhar) and Elia (Marion Cotillard) communicate by way of

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complex and beautiful chalk drawings rendered on city walls at night. In the morning, authorities work to efface the lovers’ visual messages. The eye itself becomes an
insurgent force against this oppressive authority, and is, therefore, subject to severe
discipline and punishment.3
Furia begins with a voice-over describing the struggle and the resistance. A
candle stub burns in the foreground; whiskey fills a glass behind it. “Living here
means living nowhere,” a voice-over informs us. “The harsh desert wind deadens
your senses. Maybe out of boredom, or to live before the bomb within us blows, I
go out to draw. Not to protest the situation, the curfew, or the ban on posters and
writing. Chalking the walls lets me breathe. It’s not just political slogans. If a child
drew a horse or a dog, they’d erase that, too. Maybe they’ll catch me one day but
I’ll have lived!” At this point, Théo, the hero/artist, breaks from an alleyway, and
the camera cuts to a bright full moon in the sky—that and the sun will be recurring images in the film. The voice-over continues as Théo finds a faded image on a
wall—it is a face, the face of Elia, his interlocutor, which the authorities could only
partially erase. He produces a piece of chalk and begins working feverishly on the
eyes. The camera focuses on the wall and the face as a circular white light burns in
the upper right-hand portion of the screen. Then, there is a cut to a single, closed
eye which opens slowly to reveal an eye with an inky black iris. The camera pans to
the other eye. It is blue. In the iris, the film’s title, Furia, appears. The camera cuts to
a landscape as the film begins. The ensuing action involves Théo riding his motorcycle back to a barren city in the desert. The camera scans a wall with a single, dark
aperture, then cuts to drab walls full of rows of windows. It slowly descends into
Théo’s room, where a circular fan turns. One ocular effect bleeds into another: a
ringing phone is lowered through a circular hole in the ceiling; a circular ceiling fan
(the iris?) is framed by that hole. The camera picks up the circular, eye-like knobs
on a radio that transmits fuzzy sounds of gibberish. The camera lingers over Théo
staring at himself in the mirror.
Furia’s opening moments offer a paradigm for the film as a whole. The drab
mise-en-scène and homogeneity of the buildings bear witness to the stark nihilism
of a world without art. But the dominance of eyes and eye-like, circular objects is
most striking. In these seductive images resides the fascination of the film. Aja,
a child of the 1980s, certainly learned from the films of that era, and uses these
techniques with surprising subtlety. For instance, the ceiling fans in this scene and
throughout the film create chilling associations in the fans of eighties horror films:
“After the credits, the first thing we see is the vortex of a ventilation fan—an image
that, for some reason, became a standard symbol for menace in horror films of the
’80s (Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart are but two examples)” (Cumbrow 125). Though Robert Cumbrow is discussing John Carpenter’s
Christine (1983) in this passage, the effect is the same in Furia. Circular fans recur

time and again in the film, and represent only one of the ocular objects that fill the
screen in Furia.
Elia’s distinct eyes—one black, one blue—usher the viewer into the world of
Furia, and her face in the opening credits provides a strong visual allusion to a most
iconic moment in film. In Un Chien Andalou, the incipit (“Once upon a time . . .”) is
followed by a man (Luis Buñuel himself ) sharpening a razor. He steps out onto the
balcony and looks at the moon. There is a dissolve to a close-up of a young woman’s
face. A hand opens her left eye with thumb and index finger. There is a shot of the
sky, as clouds bisect the moon; then, there is an extreme close-up of the razor slicing
the eye lengthwise. The prelude to this ocular rape and castration opens Furia. Elia’s
eye is not slit by a razor, but by the film’s title.
By its reference to the canonical film, Aja taps into the rich reservoir of critical
discussion that has been lavished upon Buñuel’s work. Jean Vigo, praising Un Chien
Andalou in its “confrontation between the subconscious and the rational,” says of
this scene: “Our cowardice, which leads us to accept so many of the horrors that we,
as a species, commit, is dearly put to the test when we flinch from the screen image
of a woman’s eye sliced in half by a razor. Is it more dreadful than the spectacle of a
cloud veiling a full moon?” (Buñuel 75). David Cook suggests that the film itself was
“as much about the collapse of European culture between the wars as a subterranean
voyage through the recesses of the unconscious mind” (310). In an essay entitled
“Eye,” Georges Bataille lingers over that image, which for him produces contradictory responses of fascination and horror. The eye itself is seductive, but to such an
extreme that it is “at the boundary of horror” (17). He calls attention, through italics, to the eye as a “cannibal delicacy” (that can devour, as in the Grandville painting
“First Dream,” but causes in the viewer such anxiety that we can never bite into
it) and the “eye of conscience.” So gripping is the power of the punishing gaze that
Buñuel, after filming the slit-open eye, is said to have been sick for a week. But
submission to ocular violence, for Bataille, can be liberating. Through enucleation,
Bataille tears down the hierarchy of the senses, atop of which rests the eye.4
Vision is a force that oppressive authority seeks to control, but Stephen King
reminds us of the squeamishness and vulnerability embodied by the eye itself: “We
all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most
vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft. Maybe that’s the worst
. . .” (qtd. in Clover 166). Buñuel’s film may be a nascent moment of transgression
in film. The slit-open eye marks a boundary rarely crossed but always threatened
in horror film. Worland is willing to believe that Tobe Hooper was thinking about
Buñuel’s opening montage in his own Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974):
Hooper conveys Sally’s terror with closer and closer views of her screaming
face, moving in with a macro lens to depict her eyelashes, pupil, and finally

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just huge close ups of capillaries laced in the eyeball. Although I suggested
this sequence alludes to Un Chien Andalou, there is no threat to Sally’s eyes,
per se; rather the extreme close-ups of the eye capture her complete physical
vulnerability and terror. (Worland 223)
In Furia, Aja regards the eye with a creative dexterity that contains multiple
meanings. Often objects of fear and revulsion, eye- and egg-shaped objects also suggest sexuality, fertility, and the feminine. At every instance the film reflects on vision
(literal and artistic), eros, vulnerability, castration, desire, and cinema itself. What
Conley writes about Un Chien Andalou is equally true of Furia: “Un Chien Andalou
is a cavalcade of loosely connected shots but also a very tightly woven story about a
concomitant rape and seduction of the viewer’s vision” (197).

The Eye and Rape
As punishment for her artistic vision, Elia not only has her eye “raped”
(like Théo, she tears out her eye because it had been penetrated by the authorities, who discharged a chip into the soft tissue of her eyeball), but she must suffer
a literal rape by Théo’s brother, Laurence (Wadeck Stanczak). Rape—as a forced
bodily intrusion, in its etymological sense of seizure and abduction, and as a trope
for a range of seductive violence—is never too far from Aja’s cinematic imagination. Sarah Projansky claims that “rape is one of contemporary US popular culture’s
compulsory citations . . . embedded in all of its complex media forms, entrenched
in the landscape of visual imagery.” She concludes, “the pervasiveness of representations of rape naturalizes rape’s place in our everyday world, not only as real physical
events but also as part of our fantasies, fears, desires and consumptive practices.
Representations of rape form a complex of cultural discourses central to the very
structure of stories people tell about themselves and others” (3). Rape is a story told
time and again in cinema, and the rape-revenge film develops alongside the slasher
film in the 1970s and 1980s, appearing in the guises of several genres: Clockwork
Orange (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), Frenzy (1972), Lipstick (1976),
and Sudden Impact (1983) provide examples. In cinema, rape is a palimpsest written
over by sexual and visceral images presented through montage, sound, and miseen-scène. It explores the tensions between rival factions, and films dramatize the
resulting transgression and retribution that play out in culture in different ways
and to differing degrees. The fault lines or axes routinely explored, as Clover has
shown, are usually male-female or country-city. Rape is invariably tied to the visual;
Clover states bluntly that in horror movies “a hard look and a hard penis (chain saw,
knife, power drill) amount to one and the same thing” (182), referring to the eye’s

penetrating and destructive power. As Alex (Malcom McDowell), the young, futuristic gangster of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, says to the beaten, gagged, and
leering husband of his soon-to-be rape victim, “Viddy well, my little brother. Viddy
well.” Spectators—those who “viddy”—are forced into identification with victims,
rapists, and avengers by virtue not only of the story but by the camera that directs
their gaze.
Rape in cinema would seem to be the logical end of a system designed to please
the gaze of men and that shows a fascination with the female form. Laura Mulvey
famously theorized the phenomenon in her seminal essay on the topic, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975, rpt. 1999), the basic thrust of which bears direct
relevance to Aja’s work as a filmmaker. Mulvey argues that Hollywood is skilled in
the manipulation of its audience’s visual pleasure. Enjoining the forces of feminism
and psychoanalysis to her treatment of film, Mulvey observes that scopophilia is
centered on the human form. Like the phallus in language, the cinema has always
reflected the concerns of the patriarchy; men therefore are characterized as active
agents, while women become passive objects of the male gaze. Women are cinematic display objects, but they endanger the male viewer because they remind him,
through their lack of a penis, of his own castration anxiety, the vagina taking on the
status of bloody wound. Women are forever bearers, not makers, of meaning. How
does Hollywood continue to produce visual pleasure in the face of the threat of
castration anxiety? Well, it has become adept at encoding defense mechanisms into
film—namely fetishism, which allows the male to deny the feminine lack of a penis
by substituting some object in its place, in this case cinematic image; voyeurism is
another coping strategy that Hollywood employs to protect its male viewers and
sustain their visual pleasure, as “the extreme contrast between the darkness in the
auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance
of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation” (61).5
Because rape is present in every one of Aja’s films, he certainly participates
in this Hollywood-sexual coding. He has become increasingly adept at seducing
viewers with both visual and auditory cues and using the constant threat of rape
and bodily violation to build tension. Seductive images move across barren terrain
and dark interior spaces in Aja’s films, proffering the “carrot” of transgression and
forming forbidding landscapes that seethe with tension. These are in evidence from
the lovelorn custodian in Over the Rainbow, who pulls the apologetic young woman
into his drab apartment to her horror and demise, to the killer in High Tension who
fellates himself with a severed head in his rusty truck on the roadside, to the rape in
a trailer stuck out in the deserts of New Mexico in The Hills Have Eyes (and here,
certainly Aja learned from Wes Craven, who just about invented the rape-revenge
subgenre of horror with The Last House on the Left [1972] and revisited it in his own

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The Hills Have Eyes). While many of Aja’s killers are literal rapists, all of them are
classic slashers, having a fetish for sharp, penetrating weapons that are essentially
extensions of their bodies—knives, awls, axes, wooden clubs wrapped with a cluster
of barbed wire, bandsaws, and so forth. But maybe the greatest horror of all is that
viewers (mostly young men) are entrenched in a system of visual codes and signs
that make rape natural and ineluctable.

T h e G a z e a n d t h e S ym b o l i c O r d e r
The naturalization of rape blunts what ought to be a sharp and terrible
recognition of the oppression that a culture of inequalities must repress. Horror
films nonetheless represent the forces on either side of the socioeconomic divide as
they play out the drama of objectification, violation, and retribution; these forces
are usually male-female or country-city. Perhaps the most original aspect of Aja’s
breakout film, High Tension, is that it explores a different rift in our culture of
rape—heterosexual and homosexual. Through his gay, lovelorn, insane butcher of
a heroine, Marie, he is able to explore prominent themes of 1970s and 1980s horror
(the dysfunction of the nuclear family, the return of the repressed, and so on) but
does so in a new way. Marie’s gaze is arrested by Alex (Maïwenn Le Besco) and she
is driven to remove all obstacles to her buried psychosexual fantasies.
The murderous lesbian is of course not Aja’s innovation, but he adopts the
motif for the slasher genre. In her book Insane Passions, in fact, Christine Coffman
notes: “At the turn of the millennium, the figure of the psychotic queer woman has
made a spectacular return in Western cinema” (191). Among the popular films dealing with this topic—from Basic Instinct (1992) to Single White Female (1992)—she
mentions High Tension, released in the United States in 2005. Coffman also mentions several lesser-known films, including cinematic representations and documentary accounts of the Aileen Wuornos story and representations of the Papin sisters
(Sister My Sister [1994] and Murderous Maids [2000]), their brutal assault on their
employers in 1933, and Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the affair. The relevance to Aja’s
film is so striking that some discussion of the event and the debate surrounding it is
in order.
Christine and Lea Papin were sisters, alleged incestuous lesbians, and domestic
servants in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Lancelin and their daughter, Genevieve,
who owned a house in provincial Le Mans, about 125 miles southwest of Paris. The
sisters worked for Mr. Lancelin, a lawyer, for six years. By all accounts the Lancelins
were harsh and austere, demanding a strict regimen of cleanliness. Images of white
gloves tracing sills for dust and messages delivered on trays as the usual form of
communication dominate. The sisters shared an upstairs room, their chambre de

bonne. On February 2, 1933, Genevieve and Mrs. Lancelin returned home in a rush,
late for a dinner date. A blown fuse caused the lights to go out in the house. Sternly
reproached, the sisters reacted with an outburst of violence: they ripped out their
employers’ eyes with their bare hands; Mrs. Lancelin was brained by a pitcher and,
retrieving a knife and hammer from the kitchen, the sisters proceeded to rip and
mutilate the legs, thighs, and buttocks of the women, drenching their genitals in
blood. When the corpses were discovered several hours later, the police burst into
the maids’ room to find them washed and cleaned, sitting up in bed and embracing
each other. The bloody hammer at the bedside led to their arrest.
Jean Genet was inspired by the Papin murders, initiating the theatrical production of The Maids in 1948. His imaginative representation of the affair was violent
and subversive. Through Claire and Solange, Genet explores the love/hate relationship those in servitude feel for those who hold their figurative chains. Human identity becomes a shifting succession of masks, gender roles, and moral values. In a 1933
issue of Le Minotaure, Lacan argues that the sisters’ crime was rooted in their purported homosexual bond. Drawing on Freud’s ideas about paranoia and repressed
homosexual feelings, Lacan argues that the sisters slew their employers in a fit of
paranoid psychotic homophobic projection. The Papin sisters were thus portrayed
as brutal and dangerous outsiders to the French bourgeois norms and, Coffman
argues, “the incestuous lesbian desire of which the Papin sisters were suspected was
also a subterranean current within the bourgeois family” (33–34).
The same perceived threat to the nuclear family drives High Tension, and the
crisis that unleashes the killer turns on the gaze. Marie and Alex, the two principal
characters, are female college students on their way to visit Alex’s family, who live
in a remote farmhouse. Their relaxing visit is interrupted by a sadist who systematically and brutally slaughters the family from the top of the hierarchy on down.
Marie and Alex survive, but Alex is captured, bound, and gagged by the killer, who
is by turns pursued by and pursuer of Marie. However, all is not as it seems.
The “high tension” of the title refers to the tension caused by love, in this case,
same-sex desire. But the audience does not know that, immediately. The first big
hint: Marie goes out for a cigarette and catches sight of Alex showering. She lingers
over the vision; then there is a cut to an empty swing. Marie goes upstairs to masturbate while listening to “Runaway Girl” by U-Roy, with the lyrics, “Just another girl,
that’s what you are.” As she orgasms, the rusty van pulls up to the house, containing the serial killer, who will turn out to be the manifestation of Marie’s repressed
homoerotic desire.
High Tension, like Lacan’s narrative of the Papin affair, pits same-sex desire
against the traditional patriarchal structure. Lesbianism becomes a “paranoid crime,”
taking the form of a male serial killer. Marie—the lesbian outsider—destroys the
nuclear family and abducts (“rapes”) the daughter. The father, as head of the family,

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has his head removed. The mother has her vocal chords cut and her hands carved
off with a small knife (while Marie is situated simultaneously as the immanent killer
and the transcendent spectator, beholding the mutilation through the slats of a closet
door). The little boy, a “cowboy,” is shot. The monster does not die: at the film’s end,
when Alex is brought in to identify the overtly insane Marie, who is concealed behind
one-way glass, Marie senses her presence and turns toward her with open arms. The
danger to the nuclear family persists. Like The Stepfather (1987), an outstanding 1980s
slasher film which offered a critique of patriarchy rather than reinforcing a puritanical ethic, High Tension questions family structures and male-centered heterosexual
institutions that engender violence. A viable reading of High Tension is of course that
it is rather conservative in its portrayal of a monstrous, homicidal, deviant destroyer
of families. However, both films confront the limiting strictures of family and the
whole monolith of a culture that limits people on the basis of biological and sexual
difference and tries to force them into predetermined roles.
From the film’s outset, Aja establishes tension between the entrenched world
of the traditional family, with its drab, nondescript parent figures in their dark and
claustrophobic home, and the free and happy world of female bonding. As Alex and
Marie journey to the isolated family farmhouse, the sun shines down on them as they
joke and sing along to a bouncy Italian pop song, “Sara Perche Ti Amo”—“It will
be because I love you”—a proleptic moment in the film. Before they arrive, a killer
waits in a rusty truck, fellating himself with a severed head, which he then tosses
out the window. At the family farm, Marie is introduced to the symbolic order, and
the reception is cold. The dog barks at her. The father quickly retires. Marie learns
that Alex is suffering because she likes a man who is already in a relationship. Later,
as Marie sits on a swing, smoking, she glances up to see Alex showering. When the
camera swings back to Marie, the swing is empty, and the camera lingers over a convergence of feminine images: a full white moon gleaming and reflecting off a pond.
Terrible slaughter will ensue after this subtle turning point.
Lacan famously finds the origin of the individual subject in the mirror stage
of a child’s development. The emergent “self ” is always formed in reference to some
“other,” whether that other is the child’s own reflection in a mirror or any other being
perceived and identified with. Rather than helping in the formation of a stable and
healthy ego, that other is invariably viewed as a rival or a threat to the self, meaning
that the subject is always formed out of aggression and alienation. Seeing and looking, “the gaze,” then, is perhaps the spring of hostility in life as we begin to make our
way in the world.
High Tension points to the importance of Freud’s pre-Oedipal stage, a time of
plentitude and bonding between mother and daughter, a union that is repressed
and, though buried in Marie, longs to reemerge. The swing she sits in as she “scopes
out” Alex is her cradle, and she rocks placidly beneath a full moon, observing the

object of her desire. In this, Lacan’s Imaginary Order, the child is so attuned to the
mother that it does not even distinguish between the two bodies. The female child,
entering the symbolic order at age five, brings with her the burden of lack—lack
of the Name of the Father, his language, his phallus. This difficult transition from
the imaginary to the symbolic order begins with the mirror stage when separation
from the mother is first perceived. Marie is caught in a struggle to find union and
pleasure. She seems to deny her very sexuality; her hair is short, her features masculine. She wears no make-up and dresses in neutral colors (a gray t-shirt and faded
blue jeans) and in clothes that conceal her hour-glass shape. She does not look soft.
All of this is in contrast to Alex, the objet a, who is soft, has flowing hair, and wears
make-up and bright colors.
Alex is Marie’s tie into the real, the connection lost when Marie was separated
from her mother and forced to adopt the Name of the Father. The objet petit a, or
object small a, is that elusive, missing object that will, in the subject’s mind, satisfy the drive for plentitude and wholeness, “a” being the first letter of the French
word for “other” (autre). In the Lacanian scheme, the objet a transforms, through
metonymy, into the object of desire that in turn motivates the split subject to quest
for that initial unity it can never again achieve. The subject, from the moment it
employs the gaze, becomes, in Lacan’s words, “punctiform,” and begins to fall away.
At the moment when the rusty van pulls up to the farmhouse, Marie’s identity is, in
effect, “sucked out of her,” as the camera rapidly zooms out from her anxious figure
standing in tableaux.
The serial killer is obviously the double, the doppelgänger, of Marie. His scene
of masturbation with the severed head parallels Marie’s masturbatory experience in
the guestroom. The discarded head resembles Alex. But Marie seeks reunion with
the mother, and when she finally receives, at circular-saw point, a forced profession
of love from Alex, her pleasure is nongenital, the fulfillment of a pre-Oedipal desire
for union with the mother. She kisses Alex gently and stares lovingly at her bloody
face from out of her own bloody and mutilated countenance. Even after Alex drives
a crowbar through her shoulder, Marie continues to gaze at her lovingly, repeating
over and over, “We’ll never be apart again . . . .” Like the reflection of the moon in the
pond, Marie’s gaze into Alex’s face reestablishes the union of the mirror and casts
her back to a time before hierarchies and before the father. The male killer is not
seen again.
Marie, at this moment in the film, has returned to the first source of pleasure.
In the final scene, Marie sits in her holding cell behind (one-way) glass, dressed in
white swaddling clothes, smiling vacantly and lolling her head like a newborn. Like a
(fearful) mother, Alex—who has obviously been brought in to identify the killer—
whispers, “She can’t see us, right?” But the instincts within Marie are too strong,
and she turns to look lovingly at Alex and stretch out her twining arms in a gesture

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that says “hold me.” Marie’s desperation to return to this pre-Oedipal stage of bliss
and plenty is also seen in Aja’s meaningful choice of song throughout the film. For
instance, as the final scene described above progresses, a song by Muse, “Born Again,”
begins to play, with its haunting melody and lyrics, “Destroy the spineless / Show
me it’s real / Wasting our last chance / To come away / Just break the silence / ’cause
I’m drifting away, / Away from you.” Earlier, when Alex is kidnapped and the killer
is admiring the image of her face as he drives (other women’s faces are affixed to his
“rearview”), Gray Félix’s “Á Toutes Les Filles” plays on the radio. The title translates,
“To all the little girls,” and the song addresses “all the little girls I used to know in
Kindergarten,” paying homage to little girls who stay little, contrasting the figure of
the shy little girl to the fully grown, sexual woman. The song expresses the same ubi
sunt feel of François Villon’s “The Ballad of the Dead Ladies.” Marie has repressed
the imaginary order and wants only to return to that pleasurable ecstasy. The eye,
both a mirror and a lens, is the only means of redress and return.

C lo s i n g T h o u g h ts
Aja began making films in a French culture that, like many developed
nations confronted by a new world of globalism and multiculturalism, questioned
its national identity. In the hopes of reinforcing the center, subversive art forms were
marginalized. Martine Beugnet writes of a “cinema of abjection” in the 1990s, in
which filmmakers sought, above all, transgression:
Some directors concentrate on Taboo subjects (violent crimes, rape, incest),
and draw on the conventions of genres such as gore and pornography, that
have been marginalized by both mainstream and art cinema. Often, the body
as flesh is the raw material of the filmmaking; assaulted, mutilated, violated, it
becomes a war zone, symbolic of the attack that is supposedly performed by
the same token on social, cultural, and cinematic conventions. (295–96)
The cinema of abjection, then, focuses on those elements of a society that are
filthy, aberrant, and must be cast out. They are monstrous, created by a system that
loathes them and wants to eliminate them. Aja finds a fascination with these beings.
They are terrible, repulsive; nonetheless, viewers are forced into identification with
them. Instead of working at the margins of French culture, though, Aja has been
imported by Hollywood, where he is free to produce hybridized films which might
loosely be called slasher films, but really draw upon a myriad of styles, genres, and
influences. His work serves as an example of the cross-cultural, transnational nature
of horror film, which may be the future of the genre in America.

N ot e s
1. The significance of this victim’s name is an early sign of Aja’s status as cinéaste. The story of
Nero’s mother as told by Saint Peter was recorded by Jacobus de Voragine in The Golden Legend.
Nero, obsessed by a desire to see the womb he had once inhabited, had his mother killed and cut
open. Nero’s perverse desire to gaze upon his mother’s viscera is not unlike that of a modern-day
slasher. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 1, trans. William
Granger Ryan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 347.
2. This grotesque, farcical scene uncannily seems to reproduce the experience of birth, or
rather, the trauma that comes with the birth of visibility itself.
3. There are many reasons why Aja may have turned to Julio Cortázar’s short story “Graffiti”
as inspiration for Furia. The short story seems to have been inspired by the so-called Dirty War,
which took place in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, during the first years of Aja’s life. Amid the
state-sponsored torture and murder of possibly as many as 30,000 people, Cortázar chronicles
the relationship between two artists who can only communicate by drawing pictures on walls at
night, only to have the drawings washed away in the day by the authorities of a repressive regime.
4. Bataille’s fullest treatment of eye-rape and degradation is his first novel, Story of the Eye, an
early edition of which appeared in 1928.
5. Mulvey’s essay has been widely studied, taught, appropriated by fellow critics adopting a
feminist-psychoanalytic reading of films, and finally, successfully attacked and deflated. Notably,
Carroll in 1990 offered an alternative involving the use of paradigm scenarios toward an “image of
women in film model” (“Image of Women” 358). Psychoanalysis may well be used inappropriately
as a lens through which to read viewers’ reception and response to a cinematic image, but
psychoanalytic theories of language and development—especially those of Jacques Lacan—can
help decipher the dynamics of the eye-function in that terrible love story, High Tension.

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,
Is dearly bought; ’tis mine and I will have it.
— W i l l i a m S h a k e s p e a r e, The Merchant of Venice

“It ’s F u n to b e S c a r e d”— H o r r o r a n d H a b i t uat i o n
In 1981, renowned American film critic Roger Ebert decried the state of
horror cinema at the time in his reviews of two sequels released that year, Friday
the 13th Part II and Halloween II. In reviewing the former, he describes the film’s
opening sequence in which a young woman “wakes up, undresses, is stalked by the
camera, hears a noise in the kitchen.” Ebert continues: “She tiptoes into the kitchen.
Through the open window, a cat springs into the room. The audience screamed
loudly and happily: It’s fun to be scared. Then an unidentified man sunk an ice pick
into the girl’s brain, and for me, the fun stopped. The audience, however, carried on.
It is a tradition to be loud during these movies, I guess.”
At the end of the review, which he notes can be substituted for any Friday
the 13th film of one’s choice, Ebert surmises that teenagers in earlier decades would
not have been able to understand “a world view in which the primary function of
teenagers is to be hacked to death” (142–43). In his review of Halloween II, Ebert
quotes John McCarty’s book Splatter Films and the notion that, in splatter movies,
“mutilation is indeed the message—many times the only one.” Halloween II, says
Ebert, “fits this description precisely. It is not a horror film but a geek show” (158).
By “geek show”’ Ebert presumably means that such horror films place an emphasis
on exploitive, carnival-like violence, similar to that of the sideshow carnival in which
the geek’s act consists of biting the heads off of live chickens. Such an act is by
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most accounts both gruesome and senseless, yet apparently not without its macabre charms as demonstrated by its historic role in carnival history. So too then, by
Ebert’s comparison, are an increasing amount of horror films: gruesome, senseless,
but undeniably popular.
The question then becomes: just how gruesome are these films? More specifically, if American horror films were in fact exceedingly gruesome in the early 1980s,
how much gore is present in the average horror film some twenty-five years later,
when images of torture and mutilation have seemingly become even more prevalent? Has there indeed been an increase in the sheer amount of gore seen on screen
in recent years thanks to the popularity of such films as Saw (2004), Hostel (2005),
and their sequels? This essay is one attempt at answering some of these questions,
by studying a recent ten-year period of American horror cinema, from 1998 to 2007,
in order to quantify specific trends in the level of how much screen time gore occupies in recent horror films.
The larger question behind these inquiries is whether there has been an evolution of gore in the horror genre throughout film history. Certainly, to most people,
modern horror films seem gorier than those of decades past—but just how accurate
are these perceptions? Do horror films devote more of their total running time to
shots and scenes depicting gore with each passing year? If such a trend is not seen
year by year, is it revealed decade to decade? In addition to the resurgence of previously dormant subgenres such as zombie films (not regularly seen since the mid/
late 1980s, but revived in large part due to the success of 2002’s Resident Evil and
2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake), the current decade has also seen the creation of
new subgenres (such as the “torture-porn” film, a moniker tentatively given by critics
and many fans to such films as Saw, Hostel, and the like, and the rise of the “horrorremake” in which older films are updated with modern special effects). Gory movies have increasingly become a target of criticism in recent years, with many critics
decrying the progressively violent imagery of the horror genre. The Christian Science Monitor reported, for example, how the formerly “subtle” nature of horror film
advertising has since “given way to gory trailers, billboards, and magazine campaigns”
(Goodale). The Motion Picture Association of America suspended the rating process for the film Captivity (2007) until its poster campaign, which showed various
images of its star being tortured, was suspended. The MPAA also demanded that
the poster for The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007) be changed because it depicted a hand
reaching out from a body bag; the hand was later removed. Hostel Part Two (2007)
was also criticized for its posters—one shows a nude woman from the neck down
holding a severed head (presumably her own), while the other is simply a close-up
of a slab of meat—despite the fact that they were actually approved by the MPAA.
Film critics have also become vocal about their dislike of what they see as a
new breed of gory horror films in recent years. One critic states: “we’ve entered a

new realm of horror to push through the numbness. Witness the recent rise of truly
gory movies such as Saw, Hostel, and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes: The filmmakers spend more time concocting gruesome visual effects and testing good taste
than they do telling an actual story” (Monk). Ebert has himself also been critical of
modern horror films, never more vehemently than in his review of the remake of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) which he calls “contemptible” as well as “[v]ile,
ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of reason to see it.”
There is no worthy or defensible purpose in sight here: The filmmakers want
to cause disgust and hopelessness in the audience. Ugly emotions are easier to
evoke and often more commercial than those that contribute to the ongoing
lives of the beholders. This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and
severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants
to be a test: Can you sit through it? There were times when I intensely wanted
to walk out of the theater and into the fresh air and look at the sky and buy
an apple and sigh for our civilization, but I stuck it out. (Ebert, “Review”)
As he did with Halloween II decades earlier, Ebert calls The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre a “geek show” (the former received two stars from the critic, however, while
Chainsaw received no stars). Yet if both films are carnival-like in their exploitive
approach toward gore, how then has this process changed over time? Certainly there
are obvious differences in the amount of violence and gore when comparing horror
films of various decades: 1930s horror films arguably appear less gory than those of
the 1950s, while the latter typically seems less gory than those of the 1970s, which
themselves often appear to have less gore than those of more recent years.1 This
process is reflected in a Halloween episode of The Simpsons, with Bart complaining that Lisa’s reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” wasn’t scary. Lisa surmises,
“Well, it was written in 1845. Maybe people were easier to scare back then,” to which
Bart replies, “Oh, yeah—like when you look at Friday the 13th, Part 1; it’s pretty
tame by today’s standards” (Richmond and Coffman 37). Has there indeed been
a steady process of desensitization over time among horror film viewers, therefore
necessitating a constant raising-of-the-bar in terms of how much graphic violence is
required in order to scare audiences?
If such a process does in fact occur, Dolf Zillmann and Rhonda Gibson understand it as a form of socialization that takes place among the horror film’s primarily
young male audience. In “Evolution of the Horror Genre,” they describe the horror
film as
a significant forum for the gender specific socialization of fear and its mastery
in modern times, a last vestige of the ancient rites of passage. It is a most

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popular forum that provides boys with the opportunity to develop, through
habituation of the excitory response associated with fear and distress [. . .]
mastery of any disturbance from terrifying events. (Zillman and Gibson
25–26)
Similarly, R. H. W. Dillard sees the horror film as allowing viewers to confront
and master their fear of death. In so doing, he says, horror films hold up a mirror to
death, “the distorting mirror of a deserted funhouse which frightens us out of fear”
(Dillard 37). Such desensitization as acquired through a process of “habituation”
would therefore entail a progressive approach toward fear-inducing stimuli—such
as a persistent increase in gore. It is this process which this essay seeks to explore.

W h at Is H o r r o r?: S o m e T h e o r e t i c a l Co n s i d e r at i o n s
To reach any focused conclusion about the patterns and trends of modern
horror cinema, the selection of texts within the genre becomes paramount. In order
to discuss our chosen list of horror films, it is therefore necessary first to define
the horror genre itself. Regardless of whether or not readers may agree or disagree
with our inclusion of any given film as being a “horror film,” it is doubtless that the
films we have selected each have horrific aspects that connect them to the ensuing definitions of the genre and, therefore, qualify them for inclusion in this study.
Peter Hutchings states that when devising lists of horror films, the inclusion of
films which some may find questionable is “unavoidable” because “there can be no
fixed once-and-for-all list of horror films” (Hutchings 9). Writing on the subject
of film genre and classification, Janet Staiger describes how “Hollywood films have
never been ‘pure’—that is, easily arranged into categories. All that has been pure has
been sincere attempts to find order among variety” (Staiger 185).
Such attempts at categorization, Staiger reminds us, often prove to be problematic for many scholars. Stephen Prince notes, “While Horror’s popular appeal
has proven especially durable, it is not a distinctive factor that sets horror apart” (2).
A popular definition, although almost too encompassing alone to prove functional
for this study, is that the horror film has the intent to horrify. This is of course an
obvious tautology, but it is a useful one nonetheless. Comedies are made with the
intent to inspire laughter. Pornographic films intend to arouse sexual desire. Horror
films are created with the intent to unsettle the audience and inspire fear—to scare
us and to horrify us, ideally instilling an enduring sense of dread and fright that lasts
beyond the duration of the film.
Indeed, many modern critics see a growing distinction between these two
ideas—the scary and the horrific—comparing films that are deemed to be truly

scary with those that merely evoke disgust at increasing levels of gore and bloodshed. Regardless, films that fall under the generic classification of “horror film” share
a central concern with the subject of death. Dillard describes horror films as a forum
for exploring “the dark truths of sin and death,” and our acceptance of the inevitability of death (36). Similarly, Ron Tamborini and James Weaver see horror films as
providing “rituals [through which] we confront and learn to deal with our fear of
death and our thoughts of what might lie beyond” (12).
Neighboring genres often transverse into the horror film’s death-oriented subject matter and fear-based intent: the action film can utilize the threat of omnipresent death and hidden danger, revealing the enemy through a jump-cut, a common
device of horror films. Likewise, the thriller aims to create a wild anticipation that is
very similar to an important demarcation of horror: sustaining an intangible sense
of dread from the disruption of natural law. This common narrative element, however, still lacks clarity when distinguishing the horror film from the serial murderer
thriller. Horror, as an umbrella genre of pessimism and mortifying suspense, generally has two common methods for unsettling the audience: that of a tainted or
deadly atmosphere (the thriller) and that of the graphic presentation of violence or
death.
In literary terms, Devendra P. Varma notes this distinction in approach as
being the divide between horror and terror in narrative: “Terror creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual and psychic dread [. . .] Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre” (qtd. in Cavallaro 3). Varma further labels this dichotomy
as the difference “between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse” (2).
This demarcation of the grotesque (including but not limited to visible gore, often
related to shock) and atmosphere (critically acclaimed as building suspense) reveals
a theoretical divide in the genre, although both approaches are often combined in
a single sequence—one that might create an atmosphere of omnipresent danger
and end with a gruesome murder or discovery. The horror film, in the sense of this
definition, becomes a consistent, graphic examination of the macabre, characterized by an irreversible destruction of the protagonist’s physical or mental well-being
through a series of encounters with bloodshed and/or terror.
Jonathan Crane, in regard to films stemming from Psycho’s “violent” lineage,
defines the on-screen gore proliferated through horror as being the “singular hallmark of the genre” (153). While this simplification of his argument may seam naïve,
the fact that certain horror films are celebrated for their notable absence of graphic
violence (such as The Others, 2001) reveals the entrenched prevalence of gore in the
horror genre overall. During the gruesome “shock” and macabre spectacle of onscreen gore, the narrative is likewise momentarily dissolved: “Corporeal ground zero
is reached once the body has been eviscerated by a gutting that also includes the
simultaneous stripping of narrative conventions to the bone” (Crane 162). Through

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this theoretical framework, horror then becomes a genre focused on the suspension
of narrative in favor of horrifying the audience, achieved through the deconstruction of natural/comprehensible law by a supernatural or incomprehensible force.

D e f i n i n g G o r e: T h e M e at o f t h e S t u dy
Fundamental to the study of gore is the bodily context of horror films,
which has served as a central concern for many of the genre’s scholars. Anna Powell’s Deleuze and Horror, for example, analyzes the theories of philosopher Gilles
Deleuze in relation to the horror genre, particularly his idea of the “body-withoutorgans.” Defined as “the ‘true’ condition of the human body if freed” from the limitations of its physical confines, Powell cites the film Hellraiser (1987) as a “graphically
literal” example of the body-without-organs, whereby a character has organs that
can “stick themselves back together” (211). Given the blood-soaked imagery conjured by this example, it can certainly be described as “gory” by most accounts. Gore
then, as defined by this study, includes the explicitly visible, filmic representation of
bloodshed or its direct result: the on-screen defacement or mutilation of—and/or
penetration of objects into—a body, as well as the exposure of blood, sinew, organs
and/or viscera resulting from such actions. Gore is therefore intrinsically defined
by its bodily context: from the decayed flesh of a corpse to the residual blood splatter caused by a zombie bite or knife wound, gore involves a process whereby the
human body is in some way wounded (typically by an exterior force or object) and
its natural corporeal state altered (be it through blood loss, flesh distortion, physical
transformation, and so forth).
In studying cinematic gore, we aim in our investigation to shed an empirical
light on the quantity and type of gore present in the modern American horror film.
Our intent is to document whether there has been a marked change in terms of how
much screen time is devoted to gore—whether viewers are becoming increasingly
exposed to gore for longer periods of time in modern American horror cinema.
Our focus does not examine gore from a qualitative perspective, whereby one might
seek to document whether the gore in horror films is becoming more disturbing or
frightening to modern viewers via an analysis of the theoretical connections among
gore, fright, and disgust and how they apply to audience reactions. To deem something as scary or frightening is ultimately a subjective process that becomes dependent upon such factors as the viewer’s psychological profile and their current level of
desensitization to images of gore (typically born out of how many horror films they
have already seen, but perhaps also related to whether their job exposes them to
human carnage, et cetera). Furthermore, individual viewers will undoubtedly react
differently to various scenes of gore depending upon the content and context—
gunshot wounds might not make someone flinch, but stabbings instill a frightful

squeamishness; one may not be fazed by human disembowelment, but may be
shocked by the same action committed against an animal, and so forth. Such an
approach to studying gore would certainly prove to be a rewarding one, but one that
is outside of the scope our current research given that it entails an entirely different
methodology than our current empirical focus. Mikita Brottman’s Offensive Films:
Toward an Anthropology of Cinema Vomitif would likely serve as a key text in such a
qualitative study of how modern audiences respond to different types of gore.2
Our current study argues, then, that gore is something that can be quantified in order to track its prevalence in horror films. Indeed, to a certain extent, any
potential study on the qualitative effects of gore on audiences cannot proceed if one
does not know what kinds of gore are present in horror films, and in what durations.
In order to study gore levels from an empirical perspective, a certain amount of
categorization via a content analysis methodology was required in order to quantify this gore in an exact manner.3 To begin, a distinction was immediately recognized between gore caused by violent acts as they are happening, and gore caused
by violence that has already occurred. As such, the divide between a violent/gruesome act performed on-camera (a stabbing or an autopsy, for example) and the gore
resulting from unseen, prior violence to a body (a dead body or a crime scene) is
distinguished by the separate notions of “active” and “passive” gore, respectively. An
on-screen decapitation, for example, is categorized as active gore, while the common
successive shot of the severed head is categorized as passive gore—the aftermath of
a bodily mutilation not being presently performed.
Our application of a content analysis methodology took the form of logging
the quantities (measured in seconds) and varieties of gore while watching DVD
copies of selected films. Our research sample consisted of one hundred American
horror films, spanning the time from 1998 to 2007.4 All such films that had a theatrical release during this period were considered, with their inclusion in the genre
being determined according to the aforementioned theoretical definitions. Given the
cyclical popularity of specific film genres, it was often difficult to find ten American
films in a given year that belonged solely to the horror genre. In such cases, crossgenre films in which horror played a prominent role were included, such as the
action/horror film Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004), science-fiction/
horror films such as The Faculty (1998) and Hollow Man (2000), and supernaturalthemed films such as The Gift (2000) and Godsend (2004). Ten films from each year
of this ten-year period were then selected using a random-number generator, with
each film being screened and its gore quantified.5
The latter process occurred through the use of what we designated as our “gore
logs”: spreadsheets that allowed each instance of gore to be encoded according to
more than twenty different categories, which were separated into sections for both
active and passive gore.6 The active gore section included categories for such specific acts as disembowelment, decapitation, dismemberment, burning or melting

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flesh, eyeball penetration or removal, the disfiguration or removal of skin, bloodsplatter/spray/flow, gun-shot wounds, skull breach or brain exposure, cannibalism
(explicitly showing human viscera), pus extrusion, as well as visible bone extrusion
(e.g., due to breakage, skin decay). Additionally, flesh penetration was quantified
in three ways: surface flesh penetration (a scratch or graze producing blood), deep
flesh penetration (e.g., by way of a knife, saw, teeth), and full flesh penetration (with
the object visibly extruding the exit wound, such as a spear or sword). Passive gore
included such categories as severed limbs or heads, the exposure of organs and/
or viscera, skin decay or disfiguration, bloody wounds, dried or caked blood, and
residual blood splatter or smears on a character or on the ground, walls, and so
forth. When coding any of these particular instances for each film, the length of
total screen time for each instance of gore was logged in seconds according to the
DVDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time code.7
In short, these gore logs allowed for the documentation of what specific kind
of gore was present, at what point in the film, and for how long it appears. After
this process of quantification, we were able to arrive at the total number of seconds
of gore present in each of the one hundred films (as well as separate figures for the
amount of active and passive gore each film contains). This allowed us to calculate
the average number of seconds of gore in the ten films selected in a given year, for
the purposes of determining any variations in the average amount of gore over a
ten-year period of American horror cinema.

O n e G o r e, T wo G o r e, R e d G o r e, B lu e G o r e
By far the goriest horror film of 1998 to 2007 was House of 1000 Corpses
(2003), directed by Rob Zombie. It contains 1,098.5 seconds of gore, or 18.3 minutes total. This amount was a full five minutes more than the film with the secondhighest gore total, Saw 3 (2006), which contains 780.5 seconds. Together, these two
offer a snapshot of the survey results in brief: 2003, the year in which House of
1000 Corpses was released, stands as the goriest year on average in American horror
cinema, with an average of 382.55 seconds of total gore per film. The year 2001 was
the second-goriest year for American horror cinema in the last ten years, with an
average of 297.85 seconds. Hence, there is indeed an overall rise in the level of gore
in comparing 1998â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2000 levels with those of 2001 and 2003, with the latter year
demonstrating an approximate 44.9 percent increase over 1998.
There has been a marked decrease, however, in the amount of gore in 2004 to
2007 as compared with earlier in the decade (see appendix 1). Despite the steady
popularity of the torture-porn subgenre as represented by the constant success of
the Saw franchise, the average amount of gore actually began to decrease in 2004
and would not ever come close to the amount of gore seen in 2001, let alone 2003â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

record gore total. In fact, a steady decline from the 2003 total occurred over the
next two years, as demonstrated by the chart below detailing the yearly average gore
totals:
Year

Average Active Gore

Average Passive Gore

Average Total

Per Film

Per Film

Gore Per Film

1998

44.45 seconds

166.5 seconds

210.95 seconds

1999

41.65 seconds

83.65 seconds

125.3 seconds

2000

66.65 seconds

126.8 seconds

193.45 seconds

2001

72.65 seconds

225.2 seconds

297.85 seconds

2002

43.8 seconds

136.9 seconds

180.7 seconds

2003

63.75 seconds

318.8 seconds

382.55 seconds

2004

37.25 seconds

198.8 seconds

236.05 seconds

2005

52.25 seconds

150.8 seconds

203.05 seconds

2006

60.95 seconds

215.3 seconds

276.25 seconds

2007

40.95 seconds

210.8 seconds

251.75 seconds

In 2004, the gore level fell by approximately 38.4 percent, and then additionally
drops approximately 13 percent in 2005. From 2005 to 2006 there is an approximately 36 percent rise in the amount of gore. Despite this rise, however, the average
amount of gore still remains well below 2003’s level, which is still approximately
27.8 percent higher than the 2006 level of gore. The 2006 level is itself only approximately 23.7 percent higher than 1998 levels, but is also approximately 7.2 percent
lower than the 2001 level.
Furthermore, there is an inverse relationship between gore levels and domestic
box office performance between 1998 and 2004 (see appendix 2). As the average
amount of gore in a given year increases, horror films earn less money on average
at the box office than the year before. Conversely, as the average amount of gore
decreases, box office averages rise. Year to year, this relationship is as follows:
Year Range

Gore Increase(+)/Decrease(-)

Box-Office Increase(+)/Decrease(-)

1998–1999

-40.6%

2.13

1999–2000

0.406

-31.6%

2000–2001

0.54

-21.8%

2001–2002

-39.3

0.315

2002–2003

1.116

-36%

2003–2004

-38.3%

0.33

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Leaving aside for the moment questions of box office gross, which will be
discussed shortly, an analysis of these changes in the level of gore is first in order.
While post-2003 totals have not approached that year’s average gore amount (or
even that of 2001), the average amount of gore in films between 2004 and 2007 is
still generally higher than that of 1998 to 2000. We use the word “generally” in order
to stress that more recent horror films are not always gorier than older ones—1998
saw a slightly higher average gore total than 2005, for example (210.95 seconds in
1998, 203.05 seconds in 2005). On average, however, the period between 1998 and
2000 saw a combined average of 176.56 seconds of gore per year, while 2004 to
2007 saw a combined average of 241.77 seconds. The latter total is still significantly
lower than that of 2001 to 2003, which saw a combined average of 287.03 seconds
of gore per year.
On the whole, therefore, there has in fact been an increase in the average
amount of gore when comparing pre-2001 levels to those of later years. What then
accounts for this rise? Have characters such as Michael Meyers, Jason Voorhees, and
their peers been mutilating an ever-larger number of teenagers than in years past?
Have horror film audiences been subject to more decapitations, disembowelments,
and dismemberments in recent years? Surprisingly, the answer is no. The overall
rise in gore from pre-2001 levels is not attributable to an increase in the amount of
active gore seen on-screen. Instead, it is passive gore that has increased since 2001,
which means that audiences have been treated to more of the aftermath of violent
acts than would have previously been shown on-screen. Active gore totals peaked
between 2000 and 2001, as the former year saw an average 66.65 seconds of active
gore, while the latter saw an average of 72.65 seconds. Subsequent years would never
again equal 2001’s active gore total, despite the phenomenal increase in total gore
seen in 2003 with such films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Freddy Vs. Jason,
House of the Dead, Wrong Turn and House of 1000 Corpses.
This pattern correlates with the fact that passive gore totals were lowest
between 1999 and 2000, with the former averaging 83.65 seconds of passive gore
and the latter averaging 126.8 seconds. Passive gore levels would peak in 2003, with
an average of 318.8 seconds, but in subsequent years the amount of passive gore
would never again be as low as it was in 2000. Hence, despite the proliferation of the
torture-porn subgenre, the resurgence of zombie films, and the return of such series
as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, we find that the average number of active on-screen acts of gory violence has not increased since 2001.
Instead, it is images of passive gore—imagery stemming from the consequence of
acts of violence that have already occurred—that have generally increased in the last
ten years of American horror films.
One example of this trend comes in comparing two films: Bride of Chucky
(1998) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005). In each film, a victim’s body explodes into

pieces when hit by a semitruck, the unfortunate result of standing in the middle of
a highway. The amount of active gore in each instance of the truck hitting the victim
is comparable, with both films depicting this action in a single second. In each case,
the death is largely unforeseen by both victim and audience, with the brevity of the
action presumably serving to increase its shocking effect. Where the two films differ,
however, is in the amount of passive gore shown in each when depicting the aftermath of this death. Bride of Chucky contains only a two-second shot of the resultant
blood on the truck’s front grill, with the dismembered body parts not shown. The
Devil’s Rejects contains far more passive gore in its depiction of a similar scenario,
spending a total of thirty-two seconds to show the various severed limbs, organs,
and pools of blood that line the highway after the collision. While both Bride of
Chucky and The Devil’s Rejects use each death in order to scare audiences with its
shocking suddenness, the latter film also apparently seeks to invoke a prolonged
sense of disgust and repulsion in the viewer by way of its extended display of the
victim’s strewn body parts.
Such a comparison can also be made using different films from the same years,
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) and Saw II (2005). Each of these
films features a series of murders that occur throughout the film, with the victims’
bloody corpses regularly displayed to the audience. The extent to which these
corpses are shown, however, follows the same pattern concerning passive gore as
seen when comparing Bride of Chucky and The Devil’s Rejects. I Still Know What
You Did Last Summer contains a total of 19.5 seconds in which such corpses are
seen, while Saw II contains 102 seconds. The former typically features a one- or
two-second shot of the dead body before cutting away to a new scene, while the
latter typically features extended shots as long as eight seconds in which the dead
body essentially becomes a part of the set (or a prop therein, at least) around which
the other characters interact. As such, each of the two 1998 horror films use passive
gore as a means of punctuating a given scene before moving on to a new one, while
the 2005 films use passive gore as a compositional element of the scene, framing the
scene’s action around the gore itself. This pattern is therefore a major contributor to
the increase in passive gore since 2001, which explains the overall rise in the average
amount of total gore when comparing pre-2001 films with their successors.

G o r e v e r s u s B ox O f f i c e
With these patterns of gore established, questions of their connection to
box office performance become vital. Do extremely gory horror films make more
money or less money than less gory ones? Is there necessarily a relationship between
the amount of gore and a film’s box office gross? The top twenty-five highest-grossing

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American horror films between 1998 and 2007 are: 1. The Sixth Sense (672.8 million
worldwide); 2. Signs (408.24); 3. Hannibal (351.6); 4. What Lies Beneath (291.35); 5.
The Village (256.69); 6. The Ring (249.3); 7. The Blair Witch Project (248.6); 8. Sleepy
Hollow (248.6); 9. The Others (208.94); 10. Hollow Man (190.2); 11. The Grudge
(187.27); 12. The Haunting (177); 13. Saw 3 (164.86); 14. Scream 3 (161.79); 15. The Ring
2 (161.43); 16. Saw 2 (147.7); 17. 1408 (130.79); 18. The Omen (119.49); 19. Freddy Vs.
Jason (114.88); 20. Final Destination 3 (113.17); 21. The Amityville Horror (108.03); 22.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (107.07); 23. Saw (103.09); 24. Resident Evil (102.4);
25. Dawn of the Dead (102.33).
Four of the top-ten films in this list have gore totals of thirty-seven seconds
or less (The Blair Witch Project, 37 seconds; The Others, 0; The Sixth Sense, 35.5;
Signs, 8â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the latter two films having the first- and second-highest box office totals
in the above list). Together these four films have an average of 20.1 seconds of gore.
Furthermore, nine of the top twenty-five films have gore totals of 62 seconds or
less (The Blair Witch Project; The Others; The Sixth Sense; Signs; The Ring, 62 seconds; 1408, 62; The Grudge, 59; Final Destination 3, 52; The Ring 2, 25.5). Together
these nine films have an average of 37.9 seconds of gore. We might assume from
these numbers that horror films tend to make the most money when they contain
approximately a minute of gore or less. However, also included in this list of the
twenty-five highest-grossing horror films are eight of the twenty-five goriest films:
Saw 3, 780.5 seconds; Dawn of the Dead, 676; Saw, 591; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 579.5; Freddy Vs. Jason, 572; Hollow Man, 559; Resident Evil, 476.5; Hannibal,
405. Together these films earned an average of $154.55 million worldwide. Yet this
amount is easily eclipsed by that earned by the aforementioned nine films, which
together earned an average of $260.49 million worldwide.
Not only do less-gory horror films actually make more money than gory ones,
it is the least-gory horror films that are often the most successful. This pattern is
frequently seen on a year-by-year basis when examining box office performance. In
1999, The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project have the two lowest gore totals
of the year but have the two highest box office totals. In 2001, The Others has the
lowest gore total (i.e., no gore at all), but is the second-highest grosser of the year.
In 2002, Signs and The Ring have the two lowest gore totals but have the two highest box office totals. In 2003, House of 1000 Corpses and House of the Dead have the
first- and second-highest gore totals, respectively, but are the third- and secondlowest grossing American horror films of the year among those studied. 2005 saw
The Ring 2 with the yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s second-lowest gore total but the second-highest box
office gross. In 2006, When a Stranger Calls, Final Destination 3, and The Omen
have the first-, third-, and fourth-lowest gore totals, respectively, but are the fourth-,
third-, and second-highest grossing films of the year. The second-lowest gore total
for 2007 belonged to 1408, but the film is the highest-grossing horror film of the

year. Aspiring horror producers would therefore do well to note that there is often
more money to be made in horror films that contain relatively low amounts of gore.
While “hardcore” horror fans devoted to the genre and its numerous franchises and
subgenres may revel in seeing the graphically rendered mutilation of pounds of flesh
on screen, there are in fact larger sections of mainstream cinema-going audiences
(“softcore” horror fans?) that also like the occasional scary movie, so long as there
isn’t too much gore shown for too long.

Gore and Subgenre
If certain types of horror films are more successful than others, this leads
us to the inevitable question as to which specific subgenres are more successful,
and how gory each of these subgenres is compared to others. Are zombie films gorier than those in which deranged hillbillies slaughter unsuspecting travelers? Do
slasher films generally make more money than ghost films, and is one type of film
gorier than the other?
It must be stated up front that there is a significant market among American
audiences for most horror films. In fact, it is extremely rare for a horror film to
lose money. Of the one hundred films examined in this study, budget information
proved available for ninety-five. Seventy-one of these ninety-five films, or 74.7 percent, made a profit from their domestic box office earnings. An additional twelve
films were ultimately profitable when factoring in their international box office
earnings. Hence eighty-three of ninety-five films, or 87.3 percent, made a profit from
their theatrical release. Furthermore, two of the remaining twelve films that failed to
make a profit at the box office came within two million dollars short of their budget,
and can therefore be reasonably assured of ultimately making a profit once their
post-theatrical sales and rentals (DVD, cable, and network television, and the like)
are factored in. Horror films are therefore an extremely reliable genre for investors,
another factor in their enduring theatrical presence.
Horror film audiences also appear to be relatively loyal consumers, given that
many subgenres earn a remarkably similar average amount at the box office. For
example, zombie films such as Resident Evil (2002), House of the Dead (2003), Dawn
of the Dead (2004), and Land of the Dead (2005) earned an average of $32.51 million
in North America. This total is nearly identical with the $32.52 million domestic
average earned by what we term the “Killer/Mutant Hillbilly” subgenre, represented
by such films as Wrong Turn (2003), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Hills
Have Eyes (2006), and their sequels in which a psychotic (and often inbred) individual or family murders passersby in a rural or remote setting. The two subgenres
also share a comparable amount of gore, with the hillbilly films averaging 544.2

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seconds of gore to the zombie filmsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 549.5 seconds. The fact that their box office
performance and gore totals are nearly identical would indicate that the audiences
for both of these subgenres are perhaps one and the same, with certain filmgoers
habitually frequenting each of the two types of horror films.
In addition to these two subgenres, three others also earn between thirty and
thirty-five million dollars on average in their North American theatrical release.
Films that featured some form of extra-sensory perception (ESP) such as The Gift
(2000) and the Final Destination series averaged $30.2 million at the box office.
Slasher filmsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;including I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), Scream
3 (2000), Halloween Resurrection (2002), Cry Wolf (2005) and Black Christmas
(2006)â&#x20AC;&#x201D;earned an average of $33.32 million. Religious-themed horror films, such
as Stigmata (1999), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), and The Omen (2006), earned
an average of $35.51 million. While the fact that all five of these subgenres had
earning averages within approximately $5 million of one another may suggest that
there is a large degree of overlap for audiences of each of these various kinds of
horror films, it is perhaps more accurate to hypothesize that there is a stable but
not extraordinary market for each of these varieties of horror film. While many
individual films may even debut in the number-one position in their first weekend
of release, few within these five subgenres ever attained blockbuster status, nor
were they financial failures.
Those that do in fact regularly attain this blockbuster status, often earning
more than $100 million domestically, are period horror films. Including such films as
Sleepy Hollow (1999), From Hell (2001), and The Village (2004), period horror was on
average the most profitable subgenre with an $82.26 million average among North
American audiences. All were major studio Hollywood films with well-known
directors or actors (Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, M. Night Shyamalan). Combined
with the fact that these films had only the eighth-highest gore total, the popularity
of the period horror subgenre indicates a desire for horror films among the general
public, so long as they feature recognizable talent and are not overly gory.
Decidedly gorier is the torture-porn film, a relatively new subgenre (using this
pseudo-pornographic moniker, at least). Despite the popularity of the Saw franchise, torture-porn films were only the fifth-highest domestic grossing subgenre
(with a $57.46 million average), due largely to the poor performance of Hostel Part
Two (2007). Hence, despite its seeming prevalence, the popularity of torture-porn
is ultimately eclipsed by such long-standing subgenres as the ghost film, haunted
house film, and period horror. This may indicate that torture-porn is only a current fad, a cycle in horror films similar to the postmodern teen slasher films of the
late 1990s; that is, Scream (1996) and its sequels and imitations. Given the cyclical
nature of genre and subgenre popularity, it is perhaps inevitable that torture-porn
films will soon become less frequent. Furthermore, given the fact that horror films
have regularly utilized ghosts, haunted houses, and period settings since the early

decades of cinema, it is certain that these subgenres will continue to enjoy long-term
popularity in the years ahead, despite any cyclical downturns that may emerge.
Another such current cycle is that of the Asian horror remake, which includes
The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and their sequels, and Dark Water (2005).
The subgenre ranks second in domestic box office performance with an average of
approximately $76 million, and also has the lowest average gore total. The relative
absence of extensive gore in these films can be seen as a major contributing factor to
their enormous popularity among mass audiences, many members of which prefer
to see horror films that largely scare them through the threat/suggestion of violence
rather than through more explicit means. All of these remakes feature ghosts or a
supernatural presence as their means of inspiring fear in audiences, further testament to the enduring popularity of such tropes in the horror genre.
This is not to say, however, that all horror films with minimal amounts of gore
will be financially successful. The subgenre with the second-lowest average gore
total was that of the “Creature-Feature”: films featuring killer animals, insects, reptiles, and the like, some of which may be mutated or enlarged. The subgenre gained
prominence in the 1950s with the release of such films as Them! (1954), Tarantula
(1955), The Killer Shrews (1959), and The Giant Gila Monster (1959), among others.
Despite this legacy, creature-features were the lowest-grossing subgenre of the last
ten years, with such films as Bats (1999), Lake Placid (1999), Willard (2003), and
Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid (2004) earning an average of $22.3 million
in the North American market. Typically lacking a supernatural context, creaturefeatures may be too grounded in reality for modern audiences used to seeing the
likes of When Animals Attack on television. Certainly the enduring popularity of
such characters as Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Meyers, and Leatherface signals that audiences love to root for/against a villain that is, or was, previously
human. As such, it would seem that some horror subgenres are not as financially
successful as others. Perhaps it is better stated, however, given the cyclical nature of
the horror genre as a whole, that there are some subgenres that are still waiting to
be reinvented for modern audiences.

Co n c lu s i o n: A l l’s Fa i r i n B lo o d a n d G o r e
When considering the phenomenon of gore in horror films, we must
remember that this is not the only genre or medium in which gore is prevalent.
Action and crime films among others regularly portray murder and death, as do
television programs in such genres. Any discussion of gore must, therefore, ultimately consider its role within popular culture as a whole. Is a corpse shown in a
television police drama less gruesome than one shown in a horror film? Is one less
morally objectionable than the other?

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Television viewers might be surprised to learn that they are often exposed to
more gore overall in a single program than in many horror films. A 2007 episode of
CSI (“A La Cart”) in which the discovery of a severed head is investigated contains
139.5 seconds of gore, including a decapitation, numerous shots of the bloody head
and torso, as well as skull breach during both an autopsy and a stabbing. The episode
actually has a higher amount of gore than forty-four of the one hundred horror films
in this study, including The Ring, The Grudge, and their sequels; The Amityville Horror; Bride of Chucky; Halloween Resurrection; I Still Know What You Did Last Summer;
The Omen; and all three Final Destination films. If the episode’s length and gore total
are doubled so as to approximate the running time of a feature film, it becomes gorier
than sixty-seven of the one hundred films, including Saw 2, Wrong Turn, House on
Haunted Hill, Ghost Ship, Seed of Chucky, Jeepers Creepers, Stigmata, and Halloween
H20—as well as placing it in a tie with the zombie film Land of the Dead.
Furthermore, the film 300 (2007), depicting the Battle of Thermopylae in 480
b.c., contains 498 seconds of gore, a total that is surpassed by only fourteen horror
films in this study. This total includes a full 270 seconds of active gore, an amount
that is itself higher than that of all one hundred horror films (narrowly beating
Freddy Vs. Jason by one second). This active gore total is accounted for by way of
300’s multiple sequences featuring stabbings, sword and spear wounds, and their
resultant blood splatter. The fact that it is largely Spartan soldiers committing this
violence rather than a mutant, monster, or murderer perhaps lessens the impact of
this gore upon audiences, causing them to believe that the film is not as gory as most
horror films.
By far the goriest American film of the last ten years, however, is one that was
not included in our sample of one hundred films. In fact, the film has no connection to the horror genre either in whole or in part: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of
the Christ (2004). A depiction of Jesus Christ’s death, the film contains numerous
extended sequences of whippings, beatings, and crucifixion, among other acts of
violence. Christ appears covered in blood for the film’s majority, and there are frequent shots of blood splatter and stains. The film contains 134.5 seconds of active
gore, a total that is surpassed by only six of the one hundred horror films. It is in
the area of passive gore where Gibson’s film exceeds all others in this study, with a
total of 1,612.5 seconds. Combined, The Passion of the Christ contains 1,747 seconds
of gore, or approximately 29.1 minutes. To contextualize this number, recall that this
study’s goriest horror film, House of 1000 Corpses, contains 1,098.5 seconds, or a full
10.8 minutes less gore. The second-goriest horror film, Saw 3, contains 16.1 minutes
less gore than Gibson’s film.
Given such quantities, gore must be understood as a relative concept when
examining its prevalence. The question of context becomes paramount: when used
to inspire fear or disgust in a horror film, images of gore often inspire different
reactions than when equivalently gory images are used for alternative purposes in

different genres. If gore is, therefore, not limited to horror films alone, it must be
understood that the process of desensitization and habituation to gore is a larger
cultural process that is subject to a number of factors and influences outside of
simple horror film spectatorship alone.
Finally, as we have previously suggested, while this study has measured changes
in the quantity of gore in American horror cinema over time, the issue of quality
must also be considered. Just as genres change and evolve over time, so too do film
technologies. While many recent horror films may appear more violent to the casual
viewer despite the fact that gore levels peaked in 2003, those instances of gore that
audiences are exposed to might appear more realistic because of advancements in
special-effects technology. As these effects improve, the mutilation of the human
body appears increasingly more real looking to many viewers, which may increase
their emotional or physiological reaction to such gory imagery (factors around
which future qualitative studies of audience reactions to gore might be based). This
heightened reaction may cause viewers to assume that recent horror films are indeed
far gorier than those of years past, despite the fact that the average amount of screen
time devoted to gore is not necessarily higher. Such â&#x20AC;&#x153;realismâ&#x20AC;? is of course extremely
relative, given the perpetual evolution in special-effects technologies. Gory images
that currently seem real to viewers will inevitably lose their impact over time as the
process of desensitization continues. Further study is therefore recommended not
only to track further changes in the quantity of gore in horror films, but to examine
those changes that occur in the quality of gore as well.

N ot e s
1. Such conclusions are based on the authors’ combined experiences both teaching and
learning in university film studies courses in which the horror genre is studied. Students typically
recount such conclusions when asked to consider the differences in gore among horror films
of various eras. One such example of how horror films of previous decades become viewed
as less scary is in how their characters become marketed toward children. Just as Dracula
and Frankenstein have by now became cartoon caricatures (such as with Count Chocula and
Frankenberry cereals, to name just one example) so too have more recent characters become
targeted toward younger audiences. A newspaper article featuring a Halloween costume guide
for parents wanting to make their children’s outfits includes a section on “How to be a Freddy
Krueger.” It includes such tips as “Attach plastic knives, or other mock ‘tools of torture’ to your
fingers” (Hyslop).
2. A qualitative approach to gore might also consider Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger:
An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2002), in which the author
discusses notions of fear and disgust in response to impurity and uncleanness. Philip Brophy’s
essay “Horrorality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films” (The Horror Reader, ed. Ken
Gelder [New York: Routledge, 2000]) would also prove useful given his focus on the role of the
body in horror cinema.
3. “The method of content analysis is based on counting the frequency of certain visual
elements in a clearly defined sample of images, and then analysing [sic] those frequencies . . .
Ensuring that the images you use are representative does not necessarily entail examining every
single relevant image, however” (Rose, 61–62).
4. Many DVDs used in this study were labeled as being “extended” or “un-rated,” thereby
including scenes of gore not featured in the film’s theatrical release. These new versions are
becoming increasingly typical of how horror films are released and marketed on DVD. Since
it was not possible to view celluloid prints of all one hundred films while doing this study
(for reasons of both financial cost and the necessity of frequent pausing and rewinding while
documenting patterns of gore), such un-rated editions were the only way to screen copies of these
films. While using such data taken from films that are slightly different from their theatrical
versions in order to correlate it with their theatrical box office performance becomes somewhat
problematic, we see the value of the patterns obtained from such a comparison as outweighing
this minor methodological inconsistency—particularly since the alternative would mean having
to forego such a study altogether.

5. See http://www.randomizer.org/.
6. The logs also allowed for the option of write-in categories for documenting the occurrence
of particular types of gore not accounted for in existing categories. Some write-in categories
include the presence of a dead body covered in some amount of blood, stitching up a bloody
wound, being crushed to death (with bloody results), blood drawn by leeches, spitting or
vomiting blood, crying blood, extreme/unnatural stretching of skin, tooth removal, and scalping,
among others.
7. Half-seconds were also permitted if a particular shot/instance of gore ended between two
full seconds on the DVD’s time code.

The title of FearDotCom refers to a Web site that allows subscribers to
access a world where they can watch acts of torture being carried out on helpless
victims. Is it make-believe or genuine snuff? Subscribers are challenged by the
site’s hostess, a sultry blonde, to play a game. The challenge consists of answering
questions so as to reveal their most intimate fears. In every case subscribers die
forty-eight hours later, victims of precisely that which they feared the most: being
drowned, or killed in a car accident, or, in a memorable sequence, being submerged
by a tide of cockroaches. The only way those investigating the deaths can put an end
to them is to enter the site themselves, which exposes them to the same fate as the
victims whose deaths they are trying to elucidate.
I have found it most instructive to visit the IMDb Web site to read and study
reactions to the film, directed by William Malone from a script by Josephine Coyle
in 2002. One anonymous user of the site suggested that the film be re-titled StupidDotCom. He or she went on: “The idea of a virus invading the mind threw [sic] an
optic nerve, and attacking the electromagnetic impulses in the mind is scary, and I
hope will never become a reality.” Fear is soon dissipated, however, and the spectator
accuses the movie of becoming “too unbelievable.” One could argue that the film, as
summarized by this anonymous viewer-turned-critic, is already “unbelievable.” The
use of the formula “too unbelievable” indicates that the spectator is willing to suspend disbelief as long as the film manages to engage his or her attention as a work
of science fiction or a horror film turning on the supernatural. However, the way
FearDotCom evolves leads the spectator to lose patience and to refuse to go along
with what happens next.
I consider these comments worth quoting as they participate in a general
refusal to engage with FearDotCom. In order to grasp what specific forms this
rejection takes we need to consider other comments on the film. They are almost
58

unanimously negative and damning. For Louis B. Hobson the film has “the feel of a
sick music video.” He calls it “a grim, ugly exercise,” adding: “Logging on to feardotcom won’t give you the nightmares you seek, but it might just put you to sleep out
of boredom” ( Jam!Movies). Michael Rechtshaffen of the Hollywood Reporter writes:
“Managing to be nonsensensical, shamelessly derivative, leeringly exploitative and
fundamentally boring all at the same time, FearDotCom is the latest in a wave of grotesquely inept horror pictures that are giving the genre a horrific name.” No other
“grotesquely inept horror pictures” are mentioned. Mark Kermode of the Guardian
accuses the film of cribbing ideas from great horror movies of the last twenty years,
such as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Max Messier, writing on the site www.
Filmcritic.com, tells his readers that it is a film to “avoid at all costs.” Bill Gordon of
Horror Fan Zine dismisses the film and recommends Videodrome and Se7en instead.
Other films championed by critics the better to excoriate FearDotCom are Poltergeist, 8mm, and The Ring (the original Japanese film; the Gore Verbinsky remake
had not yet appeared). The name of Cronenberg in particular is used repeatedly as
a stick with which to beat the wretched Malone.1
The vocabulary some reviewers use to denounce FearDotCom is all the more
interesting for being strongly loaded. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle
describes as “unpleasant” the way the Doctor—the character in the film who owns
and operates the notorious Web site—whispers into one of his victims’ ear as he
tortures her. Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post calls the film “depraved” and
accuses Malone of seeming “as titillated as his villain by the sadistic perversions
he orchestrates on-screen.” The two epithets used by Rechtshaffen are revealing as
well: “shamelessly derivative” and “leeringly exploitative.” I assume the second formula is an accusation that writer and director are pandering to spectatorial voyeurism (which is thus taken for granted), whereas “derivative” means that Malone and
his scriptwriter have ripped off other horror movies. However, Karina Montgomery
considers the Doctor “genuinely scary,” arguing that the tortures carried out by him
are “more disturbing than any moment in The Silence of the Lambs.” Now we’re getting somewhere.
“Unpleasant” and “disturbing” are certainly not synonyms, but I wonder if
LaSalle and Montgomery are not saying the same thing, while appearing to react
in radically different ways. “Unpleasant” would then designate and incriminate an
aspect of the film that the subject prefers to keep at a “safe” distance; that is, to
repress. In other words, having recourse to the word “unpleasant” is presented as
a criticism of the film, whereas, in reality, it is the critic’s own subjectivity that is
revealed to be at stake. As in all cases of repression, the object evoking the repression
is at the origin of unconscious libidinal stirrings that the subject cannot accept. In
the case of the film and its critic, the film is denounced for addressing or stimulating an unconscious desire that the critic would have preferred to remain hidden: a

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socially forbidden desire has come too close to the surface. Just as the subject wakes
from a nightmare in a cold sweat when such a desire is about to obtain realization
in the dream, so one critic calls “unpleasant” what another is sufficiently alert to call
“disturbing.”
Most of all, however, critics are nonplussed by the film’s seemingly supernatural
element. Subscribers to the fictional feardotcom site are taken over by a force—or a
virus, as can happen to any computer if not protected—which sends them to their
various grisly deaths. The supernatural dimension can be interpreted as a forlorn
attempt by writer and director to explain away, as if by magic, something they have
not been able to work out or think through themselves within the technological
framework the film adapts through its use of the computer. If this is the case, then
the film’s detractors are right to be so dismissive. However, this supernatural element can also be considered as a metaphor, not for a computer virus, but for the
computer as virus, a sort of drug that ends up dominating the user until he or she
can no longer properly distinguish between the real and the virtual. It is as if the
computer were alive, a sort of modern monster sucking in the user, as the television does Max Renn, the protagonist of Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The unsettling
dimension of this confusion—what the user thought was virtual turns out to be
real—can trigger feelings of displeasure which are, precisely, disturbing or can be
attributed to the existence of the supernatural. What then takes place is an imaginary projection onto a bizarre world outside of the spectator/critic, which prevents
the subject from recognizing his or her unconscious role in these feelings.
This perplexity on the part of critics, most commonly expressed through hostility at best and violent rejection at worst, does demand that we reflect a little.
Critics are certainly justified in taking the film at its face value as a comment on,
or tirade against, the omnipotent computer as fetish, replacing all other means
of communication. However, this can prompt another question: are we forced to
take this, or any other film, at its face value? It is not a question of transforming
any element X into another element Y, which then conveniently becomes a symbol
of some latent notion that the critic teases out of the text. Rather, it is a matter of
asking why a writer and a director should go to such trouble and resort to horror,
with or without a supernatural dimension, to tackle the theme of the computer.
Clearly the notion of “virus” lends itself perfectly—but perhaps too easily—to an
approach that must perforce turn its back on realism in favor of fantasy, the supernatural, and horror, and especially in favor of scenes of a particularly nasty and
grisly nature.
My contention will be that another interpretation is also possible, one that is
intimately linked to the theme of torturer and victim, to the place imposed on the
spectator in both senses of the word: the real person who goes to see a movie called
FearDotCom, and the fictitious person belonging to the film’s diegetic world who

subscribes to the feardotcom site and hence becomes a willing spectator of someone else’s agony and death. It is not a question of replacing one interpretation with
another or of placing interpretations side by side and inviting readers to take their
pick, but of suggesting that the computer is standing in for something else and that
the game that gives the film its title has impliciations going far beyond the simple
matter of fear. Before tackling these issues, however, we need to outline the filmic
intertext that FearDotCom creates.
For those conversant in the genre of horror film and its history, the reference
to torture and snuff movies most readily evokes both Cronenberg’s Videodrome and
Joel Schumacher’s 8mm. However, I quite fail to see why critics would denounce a
film for including within its narrative and mise-en-scène references to other movies;
it all depends surely on the use made of this intertextual space. At the same time I
can only express astonishment over the absence of critical comment on certain films
referred to by the makers of FearDotCom in quite explicit ways. The first victim,
for example, is called Polidori (Udo Kier) and a graffiti on a wall, which we see just
before he dies, reads “Dr. Gogol.” Readers will remember that John Polidori was part
of that select literary gathering that resulted in Mary Shelley creating the character
destined to become the most famous “mad scientist” in classic horror cinema: Victor Frankenstein. Besides the nod to the Russian writer of the absurd and macabre
who goes by the same name, Gogol is the name of the mad surgeon in Karl Freund’s
Mad Love (1935). We shall see that these references go beyond simple cinephilia;
in no way are they merely “derivative.” The intertextual dimension also applies to
the young woman who is drowned and who is presumably based on one of the victims in that celebrated giallo, Mario Bava’s Sei Donne per l’Assassino (aka Blood and
Black Lace, 1964).2 More complex is the figure of a little girl with a ball who haunts
the Doctor (Stephen Rea) in FearDotCom. While demonic children are a staple of
horror films in general, nobody seems to have bothered to ponder specifically over
the little girl’s ball, perhaps because critics had given up in despair or exasperation
over seemingly more important issues, like, for example, the use of the supernatural.
Nonetheless, two references come to mind: the little girl in Fritz Lang’s M (1931),
whose bouncing ball becomes the metonymy for her murder off-screen; and the
ghost of the little girl haunting an entire village in another Bava thriller, Operazione
Paura (1966). In this latter film, anyone whom the little girl pursues and fixes with
her unblinking gaze is killed or commits suicide later; it is a ghost story, not a giallo
or a serial-killer movie. The parallel is striking, too striking to be a simple coincidence. But what about Lang’s film, in which the little girl is not a demonic presence
but, quite on the contrary, the victim of a serial killer? We must remember that the
little girl in the Bava was a victim first, prior to returning as a ghost to exact her
revenge. In both cases, then, the bouncing ball becomes, as it were, the signifier of a
situation in which a victim becomes the executioner. The reverse symmetry brings

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us back to FearDotCom: at the end of the film, it is the Doctor/executioner who
becomes the victim.
My argument will be that none of this is mere chance; that both the choice
of intertextual references and the torturer/victim dialectic are overdetermined
and find their source and their explanation in a number of extra-textual factors
inscribed into the film’s narrative in the form of metonyms or metaphors. In other
words, consciously or not, FearDotCom evokes films whose characters and situations bear a striking resemblance to its own and, furthermore, their significance can
be brought to light only by grasping the social and economic situations in which
the films were made. If we claim, following the intertextual clues, that the Doctor
is a throwback to the mad doctors and scientists of the 1930s, what are we, in fact,
saying? Is he perhaps the heir to their experiments, some of which were well intentioned (Frankenstein, Jekyll), while others were not (e.g., Dr. Mirakle in Murders in
the Rue Morgue [1931], Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls [1932] and Dr. Vollin in The
Raven [1935])?
All three examples I have just mentioned confirm this impression of nefarious
intent. Moreau carrying out his experiments in vivisection on live animals in his
“House of Pain” and Vollin’s Poe-inspired torture chamber are early precursors of
the Doctor’s torture chamber in FearDotCom. The remarkable opening sequence of
Mad Love shows Gogol achieving an orgasm while watching a young woman being
tortured in a theater inspired by the Grand Guignol.3 Mad Love presents torture as
a spectacle, not as a reality, but Gogol becomes increasingly deranged to the point
of adopting the position of a real-life torturer in order to obtain the woman who
obsesses him. This has obvious ties with FearDotCom, which highlights the notion
of the virtual image in a context where what is shown turns out to be only too hideously real.4
As already stated, when FearDotCom was released critics drew attention to
a variety of films they claim the film ripped off or reworked distinctly less well.
Of these the most obvious is Hideo Nakata’s The Ring, the only difference being
the computer game replacing the haunted tape. To the same end, One Missed Call
(Takashi Miike, 2003) exploits that omnipresent technological and cultural artifact, the cellphone. It seems to me, however, that the modern Japanese horror film
accepts the supernatural as part of its narrative and thematic logic. It is possible,
then, to accuse FearDotCom of having its cake and eating it, too: the film’s makers are unable to decide whether the supernatural is to be taken literally or not.
However, I am less interested in bringing grist to the mill of those who subscribe to
this thesis than in showing what I believe FearDotCom actually does, thanks to (or
despite) its ambiguities.
Let us return to the notion of the computer as virus. The site accessed is presented to the user of the computer, and to us, the film’s spectators, as a game. As the

subscriber to the site gets more and more caught up in the game, he or she loses all
sense of time. Such is the fascination with the sordid violence on the screen: is it
real or merely simulated?5 Then, insidiously, the game takes over until the subscriber
can no longer tell the difference between reality and virtuality, between his or her
status as game player and the effect of identifying with the events and images on
the computer screen. It is at this point that the supposedly supernatural dimension
comes into play: one player in the film becomes so totally absorbed by the site that
she forgets the world around her, only to find that this world has been modified to
the point where her fears become reality and annihilate her. Instead of temporarily
losing contact with the real world, while indulging in sado-masochistic fantasies,
another player is immersed in a new world where fantasy becomes so real that he
becomes the victim of the car accident he had anticipated in utter dread all along.
Even worse, this is an accident in which the car takes on a life of its own and seemingly stages the accident that kills the character.
Whatever the intentions of Malone and Coyle were, I am struck by the way
FearDotCom condenses both the self-referentiality of modernism and the postmodern conceit that, in this image-saturated world of game playing, it has become impossible to decide where the truth lies, or even whether images can any longer represent
the truth. There is a certain reactionary pessimism at work here, a sort of retreat
from any ethical or political engagement with society or history, that dovetails with
two concepts endorsed by Fredric Jameson, the former defining modernism, the
second offering a reflection on experiencing sex or violence in a form of eternal present that corresponds strikingly to the world of certain recent horror films. The “great
modernists,” in Jameson’s words, “were all profoundly utopian in the sense of being
committed to the fateful premonition of momentous impending transformations
of the Self or the World: what I would call essentially proto-political experiences”
( Jameson 1998, 131).
This utopian strain, a major concern of Jameson’s in his analyses of contemporary alienation both social and psychological, has clearly been repressed in certain
manifestations of postmodernism. Jameson continues:
[what] can descriptively (and non-morally) be called sex-and-violence porn
does offer something of a grim caricature of current aesthetic notions of an
absolute present in time. For these films offer, in a powerful reduction to
the sheer present [sic] of sex or violence, intensities which can be read as a
compensation for the weakening of any sense of narrative time: the older
plots, which still developed and flexed the spectator’s local memory, have
seemingly been replaced by an endless string of narrative pretexts in which
only the experiences available in the sheer viewing present can be entertained.
(128–29)

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I am not primarily concerned with what films exactly Jameson may have had
in mind.6 What interests me instead is how the second quote—I shall return to
the first quote later—could be a comment on a series of recent films, all made since
FearDotCom, in which the questions of sex, violence, torture, murder, and time
are of crucial importance: Saw ( James Wan, 2004), Hostel and Hostel II (both Eli
Roth, 2005 and 2007, respectively), and Captivity (Roland Joffé, 2007). To this list
can be added films that have not given rise to the same degree of controversy: Wolf
Creek (Greg McLean, 2005), The Girl Next Door (Gregory Wilson, 2007), Untraceable (Gregory Hoblit, 2007), and P2 (Franck Khalfoun, 2007).7 It is certainly neither a coincidence that the jailers/torturers in all these films behave like the Doctor
in Malone’s film, nor that the confined spaces in which the victims find themselves
are not only so many prisons but can be taken as real-life manifestations of the
virtual prison symbolized by the computer site and, simultaneously, of the actual
prison where the Doctor tortures his victims. With the benefit of hindsight we can
place FearDotCom as the first in a new cinematic cycle in which torture becomes
the expression of the subject’s freedom to do whatever he wishes, and in which the
films’ spectators are addressed directly in regard to their position in this set-up.
Given the popularity of these films, as much as the consistency of their key themes,
it is surely worth asking the simple question (just how simple is another matter):
why all these films about torture at the present time? Are these films merely “titillating” the audience, to adopt a term used by one critic already quoted to denounce
Malone’s own effort?
I would like to offer an answer to that nonrhetorical question, although certain
elements of my interpretation obviously apply to the better-known—and decidedly
more controversial—films on the list.8 First, however, two tasks await us. The first
is to sketch in briefly the points of convergence and divergence between FearDotCom and some of the more important films I have mentioned above. Inasmuch as
Malone’s film plays on the virtual/real dialectic, it has obviously far more in common with Videodrome that with any of the other films, which are quite unambiguous about the fact that the victims are not just virtually but really being tortured
to death. The question of quality interests me less than that of politics. I have discussed the political and ideological aspects of Videodrome elsewhere (Humphries
2002, 182–83, 187–88), but we can evoke usefully here the parallels between this
film and FearDotCom. They are to be found both in their raising of the question of
totalitarianism and in the representation of the ideology underpinning big business,
explicit in Cronenberg, only implied in Malone.
Before exploring and taking further these observations, however, our second
task will be to turn the clock back again to the 1930s and reconsider the genealogy
of the mad doctor or scientist in the light of recent films about torture and its gratuitous, or perhaps even not-so-gratuitous, enjoyment.9 Whereas Dr. Gogol in Mad

Love gets his sexual kicks from fictional representations of torture, the Doctor in
FearDotCom needs the real thing. We can express this another way: just as Gogol is
a simple spectator of the torture of the other, the Doctor inflicts real torture on real
victims and the subscribers are, therefore, spectators to murders which they experience vicariously. What was a fiction within a fiction in Mad Love has become reality
within a fiction in FearDotCom.
One way to understand the film is to consider the Doctor as a signifier of
something else—something that both harks back to the activities of mad doctors
in classic horror films and evokes films as different as Operazione Paura, M, Peeping
Tom, and My Little Eye.10 Whether we consider the laboratories of Frankenstein, Dr.
Rukh (The Invisible Ray, 1936) and Dr. Blair (The Devil Commands, 1941), the remote
homes of Murder Legendre (White Zombie, 1932), Hjalmar Poelzig (The Black Cat,
1934) and Dr. Vollin (The Raven, 1935) or the islands of Count Zaroff (The Most
Dangerous Game, 1932) and Dr. Moreau (Island of Lost Souls, 1932), we find that the
films have in common factors going beyond the simple need of the scientist to hide
from prying eyes. The mad scientist refuses all restraint; an extreme individualist,
he allows nobody to stand in the way of his obsessive search for the knowledge that
will bring him power and recognition. Moreover, his rejection of society stems from
his belief in his inherent intellectual superiority, his special rights, and a sense of
impatience with society’s mediocrity and orthodoxy (Humphries 2006, x, xv). In
addition, Moreau’s island does not even figure on the charts, and in both King Kong
and Son of Kong the presence of dinosaurs suggests self-contained spaces cut off
from time and evolution, another form of the eternal present outlined in Fredric
Jameson’s remark quoted above.
Money plays a significant role in 1930s horror, most notably through its conspicuous absence. The mad scientist apparently has unlimited funds at his disposal,
dispensing him from having to earn his living like the rest of humanity.11 The films
thus foreground class and economics by disavowing them: wealth goes without saying, as if money grew on trees. This, of course, is the basis of capitalist ideology
within which a massive presence—that of labor—is transformed into an absence,
which then enables the capitalist to place in a realm as hermetically sealed as Vollin’s
dungeon in The Raven, the torture chambers in FearDotCom, and the various entries
into this new cinematic cycle listed above, the means by which money, profit, and
wealth come into existence.12 What is new in films made since the beginning of the
new millenium is not simply the extreme visual horror placed before us, faced with
which we may prefer to look away (like the Nicolas Cage character at one point in
8mm). No, it is surely the self-reflexive dimension that is insisted on, which takes us
back to a film that provoked decades ago an outrage verging on hysteria on the part
of the guardians of the temple of morality: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960).
For what this exceptional film did was to represent the forbidden: the desire to

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see murder on the screen, a desire rendered explicit by placing the spectator in the
position of the highly sympathetic main character who just happens to be a serial
killer, a desire too explicit for comfort. Far from encouraging the spectator to become
a torturer, FearDotCom and the other films mentioned here are forcing him or her
to ask what it might be like to be a torturer, which is hardly the same thing.
As Freud has taught us, desire is unconcious. If I ask myself what it would be
like to mutilate another person or cut slices off a live victim’s leg (Hostel II), I am giving conscious voice to a hypothesis. But hypotheses do not exist in the unconscious:
they are represented as if they had happened, as if a desire had been realized. Whenever the wish is unacceptable to the subject, who cannot consciously entertain this
dimension of desire—especially if the desire is socially proscribed—this representation of it being carried out turns a dream into a nightmare from which the subject
awakes trembling. Films such as Hostel offer us a waking nightmare. Critics react
with outrage to these films because, somewhere within their most intimate selves,
they have asked this question and been given an answer by the film as if they really
had desired something so utterly monstrous (or “depraved”). What is so horrifying
about torture—or simply callous mistreatment—in, for example, Guantanamo or
the sealed-off secret prisons that receive those abducted by the CIA is the fact that
a supposedly average person is at the origin of it.13 The great discovery of Powell and
screenwriter Lewis Marks in Peeping Tom was to block all imaginary escape routes
the spectator might take by assimilating the desire to go to the cinema and to watch
monstrous events to a desire to wonder what it would be like to perpetrate these
events: the film’s spectators were being indicted and they didn’t like it.14
It is in this context that Malone and his screenwriter have found, perhaps
unwittingly, a metaphor for murder, not in the form of the feardotcom site’s direct
address to the subscribers, but in exactly the supernatural element so stridently
decried by critics. This supernatural element is not to be taken literally but as a conceit destined to prevent both the film’s characters (literally, on the level of the plot)
and its spectators (figuratively, because we ourselves are not in any actual danger)
from wriggling out of a situation in which we are all accomplices to the hideous
degradation of a human being.15
Nonetheless, the subscribers (subjects of the enounced) and the spectators
(subjects of the enunciation) do have one thing in common. They unconsciously
seek to obtain knowledge of that which must, by its very nature, remain beyond
knowledge: death itself. The characters who die let us off the hook, so to speak,
but insufficiently so, in the light of the denunciations and rejection of FearDotCom.
In other words, the film is too close to the bone: the desire to obtain knowledge
about the forbidden via the appalling suffering of the other has entered the subject’s
pre-conscious and triggered off a totally unacceptable and intolerable pleasure, duly
transformed into unpleasure through the pressure exerted by the stern superego.

We are in the realm of Lacanian jouissance, that desire to go beyond the pleasure
principle to achieve the most rapid and unimpeded satisfaction of a drive, which
nonetheless risks reaching the point where pleasure turns into its opposite. The
problem with jouissance is that it cannot be turned on and off like a tap: what is the
point where the “beyond” becomes intolerable, inasmuch as we are dealing with an
unconscious phenomenon?
The Doctor, a cynical casuist, has found the answer: torture someone for long
enough and he will beg for mercy in the form of death. This suits our mad doctor—
and, by extension, any torturer, fictional or historical—down to the ground: “you
asked for death, so I am no longer your murderer,” he tells one victim. Surely, then,
the fact that those who get locked into the game die forty-eight hours later is a
grim and dire warning on the part of FearDotCom: by participating in murder by
proxy, the subscribers condemn themselves as if they were being executed for a real
murder. That, I would argue, is the “deep meaning” of the supernatural element: by
switching its ontological register, the film moves its most unsettling aspect from the
diegetic surface into the subtext. Superficially, it appears to let us off the hook, but
beneath the surface, it continues to elaborate upon a hypothesis that, for the viewer,
remains entirely within the unconscious. The supernatural in the film is an imaginary escape route; this may even be true for the film’s makers, unable or unwilling to
face up to the implications of the diegetic world they have created: “If only we could
put such horrors down to a supernatural force, like the Devil.”
More than that, however, is at stake: it is as if all subscribers, by inscribing their
subjectivity into that of the game, have become not only the torturer but the victim
too. The film is asking the subcribers: “How would you like to be a victim?” Having
first been a torturer by proxy, they fall victim to the site and are killed forty-eight
hours later. This is at least part of the function of the intertextual space created
by films like Lang’s M, Powell’s Peeping Tom, Bava’s Operazione Paura, and Marc
Evans’s My Little Eye (2001). The serial killer in Lang’s film is also a victim of a force
he cannot grasp, an unconscious desire that drives him to kill: a death drive that he
exteriorizes and imposes upon the little girl. A particularly hateful and vindictive
society finds thus a sacrificial victim in the child murderer, not to assuage a vague
desire for revenge, but to be able to repress into the unconscious the forces of death
(the memory of the Great War, the economics of the Depression, the imminence
of Nazism). Mark Lewis, the protagonist of Peeping Tom, is a murderer; he is also
a victim, of the experiments of his own father, who just happened to be a mad scientist. In Bava’s remarkable movie the little girl dies as a result of the indifference of
the villagers and returns to exact her revenge. But this revenge, presented as supernatural, has an ideological dimension: the desire of her deranged mother to punish a patriarchal society for its treatment of women. The mother’s guilt cannot be
understood without this dimension—it is socially and sexually determined. What

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all these films make abundantly clear is that desire can never be assuaged, except
in death. Hence, when the subject is under the control of the death drive, he or she
seeks the death of the other but must continue indefinitely once the other has paid
the supreme price. The serial killer obtains momentary satisfaction by snuffing out
the existence of the victim, turned into an object/body to exploit. Desire, however,
cannot cease with that death, for without desire the subject no longer exists and
death occurs. Hence the need to repeat the (imaginary sensation of ) satisfaction
indefinitely, by way of an ever-increasing number of victims. This is the death drive
to which the serial killer is unconsciously submitted and to which he submits his
unfortunate victims. Poor Mark Lewis believes he can attain the serenity of plenitude by filming his own death, which is what he has unconsciously desired all along,
but he has forgotten that he will not be there to watch that particular film.
As the most recent example, and thus the film most attuned to FearDotCom,
My Little Eye deserves a closer look in this context. The film tells the story of a
small group of youngsters of both sexes in their early twenties who agree to participate in an experiment: spend six months in an isolated house and win a million
dollars. But there is a snag: should anyone venture outside at any moment for any
reason, everyone loses their share in the prize. The entire house is under video surveillance; there is no privacy anywhere, including in bedrooms, bathrooms, and even
the toilets. Shortly before the six months are up, one member of the group is found
dead. Eventually, we learn that the whole experiment is a perverse game conceived
by businessmen for their pleasure: they can assuage their desire to see young people
indulging in various sexual activities.
For our purposes here the film’s interest lies in the role played by the businessmen, crucial elements in the plot that prefigure what is to occur in later, and far
more commercially successful, films like Hostel and Hostel II. In My Little Eye, these
figures remain invisible. Unlike the torturers in the Hostel films, whose individual
motives are hastily sketched in, they come to stand in for that egregious formula
of “the invisible hand of the market,” by which neoliberal ideologues fetishize the
market as a person and implicitly reify human social relations by turning people
into objects to be manipulated. This notion of reification also happens to be present
in FearDotCom via a car that seems to have a life, or a mind, of its own as it transports its unsuspecting driver, as if by an “invisible hand,” to his death. Both My Little
Eye and FearDotCom are thus incriminating implicitly labor/capital relations as a
form of exploitation that can result in the deaths of one party: those who are being
manipulated. The action of the businessmen can also be assimilated to jouissance.
They do not need this sinister game in order to exist but it brings them a surplus:
knowing they wield power (of life and death) over the other.
Clearly there is also a sadistic component in the behavior and mentality of the
businessmen, a recurring component that becomes far more extreme and sinister

after FearDotCom, especially with the cycle inaugurated by Saw. Sadism now takes
the form of torture, and it is interesting to note that the comparatively moderate My Little Eye (if one can speak of moderation in these instances) was made
before 9/11, whereas all the other films come after.16 Since 9/11, torture has become
a fashionable topic, giving new relevance to the complex problem of sadism. While
masochists enjoy the pleasure of pain in their own bodies, sadists force their victims to endure it (Evans 168). However, in the light of Lacan’s theory of desire, we
cannot stop there. Desire is located in the Other, which does not mean that the
subject identifies with the desire of another subject, but that this desire is part of
an intersubjectivity determined by the Symbolic Order, by social and ideological
factors. Hence, the torturer/sadist is unconsciously carrying out the desire of the
Other, an empty place social subjects fill with the ideologies dominant at a particular moment. Writing shortly after 9/11 in Newsweek (November 5, 2001), the
journalist Jonathan Alter suggested that “we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation.
And we’ll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish
allies” (qtd. in Zizek 2002, 102).
If Hostel II can be seen as a more or less direct attack on Bush and ultraliberalism, then FearDotCom must be considered a “proto-political” movie (I refer the
reader to the first Fredric Jameson quote above).17 Not by coincidence, the Doctor
quotes Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” A reference to
the renowned serial killer Joseph Stalin would seem somehow out of place in such
a movie, were it not for a remark that follows immediately. To a new victim the
Doctor says: “Your death will give meaning to all those sad little lives out there.” In
Stalin’s mouth, this would mean that an innocent victim of a purge has denounced
himself as an enemy of the people and that his death will encourage them to see in
Stalin the guardian of the Revolution. Ultimately, the Doctor is addressing, via the
suffering of the victim, the subscribers to the site. Thanks to misrecognizing their
symbolic position in this network of terror, they will find “meaning” in lives under
the sway of alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification.18 They live lives during
which subjectivity is in the capable hands of the ideological and financial Other, a
subjectivity kneaded like so much dough. Applying the film’s pre-9/11 agenda to the
peculiarities of the post-9/11 world, we can easily see Malone and Coyle sending out
a warning to the film’s spectators, real or potential, who are blithely paying dearly
for submitting to the desires of the Doctor’s real-life political counterparts—those
who now justify torture in the name of giving us “security,” the keyword in the new
repressive mantra that is supposedly giving meaning to our “sad little lives.”
Thus, in 2008, ABC News revealed that those at the highest level of the state—
Ashcroft, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld—had met in 2002 and 2003 to review the
interrogation of alleged Al Quaeda members held by the CIA, with a view to using

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“enhanced interrogation techniques” (a term that must be equated with torture).19
Like Newsweek journalist Jonathan Alter, both Ashcroft and Rumsfeld had stated
in the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center that the government should not be constrained legally, given that the United States was at war
(Zizek 2002, 107). I would suggest that we find here a real-life instance of the lack
of restraint that I evoked concerning the behavior of the mad scientist in classic
horror films. In which case, FearDotCom and the other films on torture I have listed
can be seen as prefiguring America’s imminent future by repeating Hollywood’s
distant past. Given that those films of the distant past were acutely aware of the
horrors unleashed by fascism since the 1920s—The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest
B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932), for example, explicitly refers to Mussolini in
the way Count Zaroff is dressed (Humphries 2006, 204–7)—the current cinematic
cycle appears equally attuned to the political climate of its time.
With an eye less on Hollywood horror films and more on the documentary
Standard Operating Procedure, Slavoj Zizek comes to this eye-opening realization
about Abu Ghraib:
Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third
World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners
were effectively initiated into American culture. They were given a taste of its
obscene underside, which forms the necessary supplement to the public values
of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom. (Zizek 2008, 176)
This brilliant insight has its fictional equivalent, albeit one based on real events,
in that remarkable and profoundly disturbing film The Girl Next Door referred to
earlier. The film tells the story of a sick, mentally unbalanced woman imprisoning an
adolescent girl and encouraging her sons and neighborhood children to inflict first
humiliation, then physical tortures on her, before actually killing her herself. Rather
than being a monstrous outsider, an aberration from the norm, the woman in question functions as the signifier of the cultural and ideological climate of the 1950s.
An average and vulgar middle-class woman, well aware that her views on the female
body and sexuality were socially dominant, she was simply initiating both the victim
and her adolescent abusers into the true meaning of such domination, much like
lynchings in the Deep South initiated white women and children into the ways of
ensuring white supremacy. The adolescents in The Girl Next Door, like the soldiers
in Standard Operating Procedure, considered their acts as normal, approved of by
someone in authority, present in the former film, absent in the latter (although,
interestingly, Rumsfeld had just paid a visit to the prison).
Normalization via repetition is a theme that also runs through the cycle of
torture-porn films. Whereas the representation of the businessmen in Hostel II

indicates that Roth has used the horror genre to make a political comment on real
horrors being committed in the name of the American electorate, the seemingly
endless follow-up entries in the Saw franchise illustrate perfectly Marx’s insight
that those who refuse to learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat it.
FearDotCom occupies an uneasy position between the two, revealing as it does an
“unconscious knowledge.” We can define this as knowledge that cannot find explicit
expression and which, therefore, is also condemned to be expressed via a blurring
of the virtual and the real. The incoherent aspects of the film betray less a refusal
to think on the aesthetic mode than an inability to draw the necessary political
conclusions.20

N ot e s
My thanks to Steffen Hantke for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
1. Given the violent and hysterical attacks launched on Cronenberg at various points in his
long and controversial career (in particular against Shivers in 1975 and Crash in 1996), I find it
both amusing and revealing that the once-reviled Canadian is now used as a yardstick by which
to judge and cast into outer darkness more recent practitioners of the horror genre. An analysis
of this phenomenon, however, is beyond the scope of this essay. I leave readers to meditate upon
the fact that what was vile and inexcusable years ago is now palatable, especially if it can be
summoned up to denounce a new moral pariah.
2. The celebrated shot of the drowned woman in the bath, dead eyes staring up at us, is
quoted in Dario Argento’s Sleepless (2000), a recent entry into the giallo category.
3. Moreau calls his surgery the “House of Pain” to instil fear in the “manimals” who are
the results of his experiments. I use the formula in the title of this essay, not only because it
corresponds to the Doctor’s torture chamber, but because of the striking recurrence of such a
place/space in the contemporary American horror film.
4. See Reynold Humphries, The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941. Madness in a Social
Landscape (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006), for more details on these films.
5. This was the question both the characters involved in the plots of Videodrome and 8mm
and the spectators involved in watching the films asked themselves.
6. He has written elsewhere about Videodrome in terms that make a fundamental distinction
between Cronenberg’s movie and the snuff movies we are shown, whereas most of FearDotCom’s
detractors tend to assimilate Malone’s film as a whole to the images of torture and Malone to the
Doctor. See Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System
(London: BFI, 1995), 22–32.
7. I leave aside the subsequent entries in the Saw franchise, which, unlike Hostel II, add
nothing to the original that had the distinction of being, well, original. The recent FrancoCanadian production Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2007) eschews any sexual dimension in favor of the
representation of a neo-Nazi religious sect that subjects its victims to cruel martyrdom in the hope
that, at the moment of their final agony, they will offer insight into the beyond as witnesses to God.
8. If the films directed by Roth are more controversial, it is because they are far more
explicitly films of their time than Malone’s, as we shall see in due course. It is not irrelevant

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to remind readers that Malone’s previous feature, House on Haunted Hill, turned on enforced
incarceration, torture, and murder.
9. The volumes of both Skal and Tudor deal with the mad doctor/scientist as a cultural or
sociological phenomenon, whereas I have chosen to foreground class, economics, and history via
a psychoanalytic reading of the films of the period.
10. I have discussed elsewhere the narrative and symbolic function of space and place in
the horror films of the 1930s; see Reynold Humphries, The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941:
Madness in a Social Landscape (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 241–52.
11. A film that stands apart here is Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without
a Face, 1959). If the experiments of Dr. Genessier are carried out away from prying eyes, he
has both a public and private practice as a doctor and gives public lectures about science and
medicine. The film thus not only shows how he makes his money but highlights the class aspects
of the situation: his audiences are mostly wealthy inhabitants of the 16th arrondissement in Paris,
his victims students looking for cheap accommodation.
12. One of the merits of Hostel II is to foreground quite unambiguously the role of money
from beginning to end: money gives you power (of life and death) over the other. This is the
thesis of an extraordinary recent Franco-Rumanian film 13 Tzameti (Gela Babluani, 2005)
where members of an East European mafia gamble vast sums on a game of Russian roulette
(the former Communist bloc having discovered the joys of global capitalism) where proletarians
from the East are united in death, in the forlorn hope of being the last survivor and therefore
becoming rich.
13. In Captivity the heroine is subjected to blinding lights and deafening sounds, favorite
devices of torture used against those arrested in the name of the “war on terror.” The sadistic
acts of deliberate humiliation inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers (see
Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris, 2007) are, however, devoid of any fictional status: the
torturers were unconsciously carrying out the desire of the big Other.
14. See Reynold Humphries, “Caught in the act of looking. The opening sequence of Michael
Powell’s Peeping Tom,” Caliban XXXII (Toulouse: Presses Universitares du Mirail, 1995). I shall
never forget the experience of watching Peeping Tom for the first time late one Saturday night
when I was a student. A noisy audience fell silent as the eye opened in the pre-credit sequence
and you could hear a pin drop for the next one hundred minutes. Never have I seen so cowed an
audience as those who rose at the end, put on their coats, and filed silently out. As a friend who
saw the film with me remarked: “They should put Peeping Tom on every Saturday night to keep
them quiet.”
15. Conversely, the most alert filmmakers have also represented literally the death drive
embodied by their characters. I am thinking of Al Roberts’s drive across country in Detour,
Marion Crane’s drive to the Bates motel and the long, final sequence of Se7en. Significantly,
Marion ends up at a place she did not consciously aim for, the motel which was to become her
final destination.
16. Shooting for My Little Eye started in April 2001.
17. One of the businessmen in Hostel II, a deliberate caricature of Republican ideologues, at
one point advances in slow motion towards his limousine. I refer readers to the documentary
How Arnold Won the West (Alex Corke, 2004), where there is an identical shot of the new
Governor of California leaving his home and advancing to be interviewed by journalists.
18. The recent P2 is relevant here. The seemingly charming parking attendant, who turns out
to be a sadistic psychopath, remarks revealingly at one point that nobody sees him, as if he did
not even exist. In one remarkable scene he imitates Elvis, then dances with a huge teddy bear, as if

with a woman, which neatly condenses his need for recognition (in every sense of the word) and
a total social and sexual alienation.
19. See “Top Bush aides directed torture from the White House,” www.wsws.org, April 12, 2008.
20. It is useful to refer to a film that deals very much with torture but on a quite different
mode from any of those cited: Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. I would ask a question: why
did the director choose to remake this particular film (a German-language film originally made
in Austria in 1997) at this particular time (2007) in a particular foreign country, the United
States? (The remake is called Funny Games U.S.). Because he was assailed by an overwhelming
desire to become famous across the Atlantic? Because he was offered too much money to refuse?
Because it’s his favorite among his own films? I would suggest that to ask such questions is
already to stress their general lack of pertinence. I am not privy to Haneke’s reasons for remaking
Funny Games, and even if I were, I would not be obliged to accept them at their face value.
However, given that he is a highly self-conscious filmmaker (in the modernist, rather than the
postmodernist, sense of the term), it seems likely that he felt that an American version would
contribute in some way to the pervasive contemporary topic of torture.

Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists. A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. London:
Blackwell, 1989.
Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates.
London: Verso, 2002.
———. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.

Teen Horror and the Critics
Even on first viewing, perhaps the most striking elements of Gus Van
Sant’s hypnotic, haunting Elephant (2003) are the film’s understated allusions to
the stock character types, narrative preoccupations, and strangely resonant mise-enscène of the American teen movie. As the camera tracks down suburban tree-lined
avenues, through sterile and monotonously labyrinthine locker-lined school corridors, and via quasi-ethnographic snapshots of geeks, goths, jocks, arty-outsiders,
beauty queens, and bespectacled ugly ducklings, the central imagery and thematic
tropes of the Hollywood teen genre are uncannily familiar even for those of us for
whom both the United States and the period of our own adolescence are another
country entirely. More specifically for our purposes, it is Elephant’s subdued expressionist motifs and opaque articulation of repressed dread and foreboding amid
the banality of the everyday which intimate the generic terrain of the horror film.
Indeed, Elephant’s depiction of high school as an insidiously benign gothic space
is characteristic of the thematic preoccupations of much recent American horror
cinema. Perhaps most generically resonant, however, are the film’s unnervingly fluid
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steadicam shots, coolly and methodically landscaping the internal geography of the
high school, unveiling in turn the fragmented internal landscapes and psychosocial
geographies of American adolescence as it too is endlessly refracted through the
generic prism of what has become the key production trend in recent American
horror cinema: the teen horror movie.
Of course, Van Sant’s perversely beautiful and almost serenely nonjudgmental art-house homage to the gothic underside of the teen movie works precisely
to defamaliarize this generic mise-en-scène. The affectless ambiguity and disquieting sense of alienation that characterize Elephant function in stark contrast to the
melodramatic emotional lexicon of the contemporary teen horror film. Yet while
Elephant’s allusions to numerous high school shootings in the United States (of
which the Columbine massacre is only the most high-profile case) and its sustained neo-realist aesthetic—what the director self-consciously describes as “antientertainment” (Said 18)—seem implicitly to critique the high-concept excesses
of recent teen horror, we argue instead that the passionate detachment of Van
Sant’s movie—that is, its simultaneous numbing of the subgenre’s affective content
and its defamiliarizing of the teen movie’s central themes and imagery—actually
strikes at the core of teen horror’s contemporaneous generic evolution.1 This thematic and aesthetic continuum between the leftfield products of the “independent”
sector and the commercially lucrative field of mainstream teen horror is, we would
argue, increasingly evident in other recent films which focus upon the emotional
and psychosocial subalternity of youth. Critically acclaimed productions such as
Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), The Virgin Suicides (1999), L.I.E. (2001), Donnie
Darko (2001), Bully (2001), and Mysterious Skin (2004) all underline in various
ways the heterogeneous nature of contemporary cinematic depictions of young
American adults, representations that are specifically filtered through the horrors
of the late-capitalist gothic imaginary.
In critical terms, of course, the American horror film has lost much of the scholarly goodwill that it received from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, a state of
affairs synopsized by Robin Wood’s (2004) recent and mournfully rhetorical question: “Aside from Day of the Dead [1985] is there any American horror movie made
since 1980 that could be championed as any sort of radical statement about our
(so-called) civilization?” (xviii; original emphasis). As the esteemed enfant terrible
of ideological film criticism (and, with his essay “An Introduction to the American
Horror Film” [1979], one of the most influential scholars to ever write about horror
cinema), Wood’s concern with what he dubs the “degeneration” of the genre is both
significant and symptomatic. For Wood, the American horror film has lapsed into
a combination of baroque postmodern apathy—typified, perhaps, by the success of
the glibly parodic Scary Movie cycle (2000–2006)—and an apparently reactionary
agenda which, as he understands it, mirrors the decline of leftist politics and the

emergent neoconservative hegemony in American culture more broadly. “Perhaps
the new administration will goad people into a new sense of outrage,” Wood muses
with quiet fury, “but it may take the equivalent of the Vietnam War” (xiv).
Indeed, Wood’s non-too-subtle allusion here to the disastrous military adventurism of the Bush administration (2001–2009) is symptomatic of the critical backlash that the American horror film has received in recent years. Moreover, it is precisely the supposed failure of the genre to articulate the real-world horrors of the
present, as it has done so incisively in the past, which has led to a widespread sense
of critical disillusionment with recent horror films, particularly when events both
within and without American society are so ripe for expressive commentary and critique. One has only to look to the speculative critical fanfare that greeted Eli Roth’s
Hostel (2005) to witness the desperate search for cultural relevance in contemporary
American horror. Certainly, Hostel and its (admittedly, marginally more interesting)
2007 sequel invoke, with varying degrees of obliqueness, some heavyweight topics,
including, but not limited to, the specter of the holocaust, sex trafficking, violent
pornography, and the amoral logic of late-capitalist consumer culture. But confident assertions of both films’ post-9/11 resonance were, in our view, spectacularly
overstated. While Hostel was enthusiastically self-promoted by Roth as a gruesome
allegory of human rights abuses perpetrated by Americans in Guantanamo Bay and
Abu Ghraib, any hint of political critique is soon undermined by the rabid xenophobia and casual misogyny that characterizes both films. Lacking even the reflexive
self-awareness and bawdy comic intelligence of, say, Eurotrip (2004)—a film which
similarly engages with the continental misadventures of American youth—both
Hostel movies are dubiously cautionary tales that insistently warn domestic audiences of the apparently regressive dangers of the Old World.2 While this is certainly
indicative of a post-9/11 awareness of global anti-Americanism, the films do very
little to dissuade their viewers of the fundamentally reactionary nature of such fears.
In contrast to some of the more intelligent 1970s exploitation films which they ape,
both Hostel and its sequel transparently encourage vengeful emotional identification
with their surviving protagonists’ violent retribution, something which only serves
to underline the films’ endless displacements and symptomatically paranoid logic.3
Implicitly, of course, this righteous discontent is methodological, for it is precisely the critical tools wielded by Wood—that is, an ideological critique predicated
on a heavily politicized fusion of psychoanalytic theory and Marxist thought—
which have become increasingly marginal both within and without in the academy. However, in terms of scholarly approaches to horror cinema, one has only to
think of arguably the two most significant and influential critical studies of horror
cinema since Wood’s classic writing on the subject—namely, Carol Clover’s postMulveyan Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992)
and Barbara Creed’s Lacanian-Kristevan tome The Monstrous-Feminine: Film,

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Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993)—to see how their methodologies are more often
than not inadequate to deal with the generic terrain of contemporary American
horror cinema. Yet given its status as a key Hollywood production trend, in this
essay we insist upon the continued validity of political-ideological criticism of the
horror film; in particular, we are interested in the relationship between contemporary horror and its primary consumers: young adults. Although Wood argues that
“the popularity of [horror] films with teenagers is vastly more interesting . . . than
the films themselves ever are” (xviii), we would take issue with his blanket dismissal
of the contemporaneous genre and suggest instead that Wood’s emphasis on the
continuing popularity of the horror film with a youth demographic (and, in turn,
that demographic’s representation on-screen) is central to understanding American
horror in the last decade.
The widespread discontent with recent teen horror that we have been alluding to is exemplified by some recent examples of critical polemic which attempt
to summarize the degraded status of the American horror film today. This brand
of criticism is typically characterized by a combination of brooding cultural pessimism underscored by a gloomy nostalgia for the genre’s low-budget oppositional
heyday from the late 1960s through until roughly the late 1970s, a mythologized
era usually situated somewhere between the release of Night of the Living Dead in
1968 and the likes of The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and David
Cronenberg’s intelligent and unnervingly prescient exploitation output in the latter
half of the 1970s. Not insignificantly, it was the extraordinary success of Halloween
in 1978—a landmark film, which, depending on your ideological point of view, is
either something of a formal high-water mark for the genre or a deeply reactionary
proto-Reaganite denunciation of the women’s movement—which established the
teen “slasher” subgenre as the key horror production trend at this historical juncture;
a trend to be later revived and reimagined, of course, as a commercially potent force
in the 1990s. As a result of this apparent shift in contemporary horror’s political trajectory, a critic such as David Sanjek (2000) bemoans both “the tone of ennui” (112)
he considers to have belittled the genre and the “paltry or pacified” thematic and
ideological dimensions of American horror of the 1990s (114). Mournfully citing
Jonathon Lake Crane’s dictum that to watch a horror film is to engage in a type of
psychosocial “reality check,” Sanjek suggests that any affective sense of the uncanny
has been evacuated from recent horror—what he describes as the systematic “neutralization of the unusual or unsettling” (114)—substituted instead by a pro-hegemonic reinforcement of the sociopolitical status quo.
Indeed, even in one of the most cogent and least polemical of recent genre
assessments, Andrew Tudor (2002) finds “sadly, precious few horror films with the
power to disturb” or offer a perceptible “assault on horror movie sensibilities” (107).
Elsewhere, British critic Mark Kermode (2003) sees the condition of contemporary

American horror reflected most clearly in the huge commercial success of The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). “What emerges,” argues Kermode, “is a bizarre
conundrum”:
[A] film that wants to look like an authentic replica of a cheap, edgy slasher
classic while attracting the kind of young audience that wouldn’t watch a
30-year-old re-release if their lives depended on it. In short, what we have is
hallmark 1970s horror product cunningly rebranded for a jaded 21st-century
audience: a perfect example of a trend currently sweeping the horror genre. (13)
At the core of Tudor, Kermode, and Sanjek’s respective arguments is both the
positioning of 1970s horror as the generic benchmark against which contemporary
horror is judged—and necessarily found wanting—rhetorically coupled with a
broad contempt for the lucrative but “jaded” youth demographic who regularly pay
to see and enjoy contemporary horror both within and without the local multiplex. Indeed, Kermode’s dismissive tone is underlined by the implicit allusions to
his own youthful savvy and the suggestive terminology he employs. The youthful
consumers who helped The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake take over $28 million
in its opening domestic weekend are, in his view, a “sheen-saturated” and “wide-eyed,
unknowing crowd” casually exploited by producer Michael Bay and director Marcus Nispel (14).4 Contemporary “pre-packaged teen slashers” subsequently transform the brutal intelligence and scathing social commentary of low-budget 1970s
classics into “spectacularly meaningless entertainment” (15), a process of rebranding
which results in heavily front-loaded commercial properties that are “all form and
no content” (16). Obviously bewildered by the “cynical modern sensibility” of this
film, Kermode metaphorically holds his hands up in despair: “What the new Texas
Chainsaw Massacre ‘means’ to its audience is anyone’s guess”:
As a textbook disembowelling of a once unruly genre classic, it makes for
depressing viewing. But as one of the most financially successful horror films
of 2003 [. . .] it is a significant signpost pointing towards a genre future still
dominated by the ghosts of the past, still treading the road that leads to
nowhere. (16)
It barely needs pointing out at this juncture that Kermode’s skeptical use of punctuation here reiterates that, for him, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is practically
devoid of meaning on a political or even subtextual level.
Despite our reservations concerning the reductive tendencies epitomized by
this sweeping overview of the contemporary horror scene, in many ways we concur with Kermode’s unapologetically polemical stance at this juncture. The pre-sold

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Bay/Nispel reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does indeed erase the disturbing exploitation aesthetic and sociopolitical fury of Tobe Hooper’s esteemed
1974 original, offering as a poor substitute only the leeringly fetishized apparition
of pneumatic starlet Jessica Biel. Even more symptomatic and historically contingent is the remake’s most obvious deviation from the original when, in the film’s
concluding sequences, Biel’s “final girl” valiantly rescues an abducted infant from the
clutches of her persecutors. Serving no real narrative purpose other than to belatedly reveal a hitherto veiled maternal streak, this functions as a deeply conservative
and wholly unnecessary plot alteration that only serves to underscore Susan Faludi’s
(2008) persuasive thesis concerning the reactionary gender politics and concurrent
reinvigoration of “family values” rhetoric typifying American culture in the wake of
9/11. Yet while both Kermode and Sanjek are absolutely correct in highlighting the
American film industry’s preoccupation with attracting young adults toward their
products and, in turn, Hollywood’s regular depiction of terrorized youth on screen,
we would suggest that mobilizing these trends as evidence for the supposed evacuation of politics from the genre is both misguided and frequently overdetermined.
Indeed, it remains a truism that even while horror has suffered a dramatic decline
in its critical standing it has nevertheless remained enduringly popular at both the
box office and in all-important ancillary markets. Of course, for the genre’s critics
it is precisely the supposed absence of thematic depth or political relevance upon
which the commercial potency of contemporary horror is predicated, an apathetic
and ideologically torpid state of affairs Thomas Doherty has famously dubbed “the
juvenilization of American movies” and which Paul Wells (2000) has more specifically defined as “the McDonaldisation of horror” (97).
The fusion of gothic themes with the youthful concerns of the teenpic is, of
course, hardly a new phenomenon; nor, indeed, is the critical contempt casually
directed toward such movies. In a typically cantankerous essay on contemporary
teen films, for example, Wheeler Winston Dixon (2000) argues that the globally
dominant youth audience requires that movies, as a commercial prerequisite, “must
not partake of the real world, but rather of a construct having nothing to do with
contemporary teen reality” (130). Continuing in appropriately apocalyptic tones,
Dixon posits that the contemporary youth demographic wants “escapism without
risk, and when it gets too close, they lose interest” (130). The remainder of his diatribe is worth quoting at length for its bleakly archetypal vision of youthful apathy
and unwitting cultural dupery:
Hyperreality is not the issue here; the key is unreality, unrelenting and unremitting. The movie viewer, ensconced in her/his seat in the darkness seeks
above all to avoid reality, to put off for as long as possible the return to normalcy, when they push past the upturned boxes of popcorn and spilled sodas

and make their way through the doors into the world outside. But are they
ever satisfied? The entire key behind contemporary genre films is to keep the
viewer hooked, perpetually wanting more, to be satisfied yet still hungry for
a return to the same world, the same characters, the same general plot line,
with only minor variations. This explains why every cast member not killed
in Scream (1996) is back for Scream 2 (1997); contemporary narrative-driven
audiences want continuity and predictability in their entertainment above all
other considerations. Today’s genre films are really serials, in which formulaic
thrills and entertainment are dispensed in two-hour bursts, with the promise
of more to come held out in the final scenes of each episode. Tangentially, it is
no surprise that the major television networks are increasingly targeting teenage women as a major portion of their audiences for daytime soap operas. As
with film sequels, it is the seriality of the daytime soap opera, the mixture of
the familiar with a slight plot twist to keep the narrative from becoming too
predictable, that draws in younger audiences. (130–31; original emphasis)
Leaving aside the weary sub-Adorno histrionics of this fevered critical salvo,
what is most noticeable here is less the contempt for sequels and “seriality” (something which, of course, has long been endemic to the genre) and rather the almost
laughably sexist preconceptions and abject critical horror at the supposed feminization of horror cinema. To this end, we would like to make two broad points at this
juncture. First, we would strongly contest Dixon’s blanket dismissal of both youthoriented films and their allegedly wholesale escapist allure. Second, we want to highlight the (gendered) allusion here to the generic terrain of the soap opera. Indeed,
building upon Peter Hutchings’s recent (and pleasingly nonjudgmental) observation that Scream and its ilk are most productively understood “not as ‘postmodern
horror’ but rather as ‘teenage soap horror’”— (2004, 215), we would suggest that
rather than contemporary horror simply failing to live up to generic expectations
(a “failure,” which is then systematically projected onto the supposedly apathetic
political sensibilities of its youthful consumers), it is in our view more productive to
understand recent developments in the American horror genre as another stage in
the genre’s perpetual evolution. Rather than the sociopolitical commentary of horror being undermined and/or betrayed by the soap operatics and narcissistic solipsism of intra-youth relations, we propose that this is simply another phase in the
processual nature of the genre, a development that insists upon the (inter)personal
being understood as always already political.
However, Dixon’s illustrative use of the popular Scream cycle (1996–2000) is
without doubt significant. We are certainly wary of marginalizing the fluid, processual nature of generic evolution at this juncture, and do not want in any way to
claim—as many have done—special or revolutionary status for the Scream trilogy.

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Indeed, as recent revisionist work has demonstrated, a fetishistic critical insistence
upon claiming transformative status for individual movies is a trend that often
afflicts genre studies. Both Mark Jancovich (1996) and Kevin Heffernan (2004) have
demonstrated that canonical horror films such as Psycho (1960), Rosemary’s Baby
(1968), and Night of the Living Dead have regularly—and erroneously—had radical and/or innovative status projected upon them at the expense of more marginal
(but no less interesting) contemporaneous films, exemplifying the kind of critical
hyperbole that necessarily elides developments within the genre more broadly. Nevertheless, there is still much about the Scream cycle that is regularly presumed to be
emblematic of teen horror in the last decade:

(i) the films feature a recurring cast of highly photogenic young actors playing
characters in a high school or college campus environment, many of whom are
already familiar to audiences from youth-oriented television shows;5
(ii) they are set in a suburban and almost exclusively white, middle-class milieu;
(iii) generically, all three Scream films are characterized by a hybridized fusion of
horror, comedy, and teen melodrama with a concomitant emphasis on interpersonal relationships, elements that are frequently attributed to the aesthetic
sensibilities of screenwriter Kevin Williamson;6
(iv) finally, and most notoriously, the Scream trilogy offers their audience a knowing and reflexive commentary on the generic logic of the “slasher” film and
a concomitant pop-Brechtian dynamic that underlines their appeal to the
shared cinematic experiences and subcultural capital of youthful media consumers. In other words, Wes Craven’s Scream franchise offers a densely intertextual experience that rewards and sustains the pleasures of repeat viewings
in subsequent ancillary releases.7
As a number of commentators have suggested, however, the comically baroque
generic model we have briefly sketched above is not by any means as hegemonic as
is often presumed.8 Furthermore, contrary to, say, Rick Worland’s assertion that
the Scream series “is about almost nothing except the often-simplistic formula of
the slasher cycle of the early 1980s” (2007, 19; emphasis added), we would counter
that this self-awareness demonstrates the ways in which contemporary teen horror
reflexively understands that popular culture is a hugely important element in the
cultural fabric of its audience’s everyday lives. So while the box office success of
Scream undeniably reinvigorated teen horror as a commercial property, this production trend has been more diverse and sophisticated in terms of narrative, tone, and
thematic concerns than has often been recognized. Indeed, the genre continues to
sustain itself via the perennial evolutionary dialectic between familiarity and novelty,

with the representation of young adults functioning as the most fixed and unwavering element of recent years. Thus, whereas the rhetorical strategy employed by the
critics cited above tends to emphasize the formulaic and homogenizing elements of
recent teen horror, we prefer to focus upon the more interesting differences between
individual horror texts. To paraphrase Lucy Fischer (1996), horror continues to
offer expressionistic allegories of psychological and social realities, and for contemporary viewers the primary way these realities are communicated is through the
hybridized generic lexicon and melodramatic emotional resonance of contemporary
teen horror.

T e n Y e a r s o f T e e n H o r r o r: A ( G ua r d e d ly ) Opt i m i st i c Ov e r v i e w
This is not to suggest, of course, that all contemporary teen horror necessarily warrants sympathetic reevaluation. In addition to the problematic Hostel films
cited above, we would also suggest that a film like Wrong Turn (2003)—rather than
simply being “about almost nothing”—is equally dubious as, among other things, a
conservative and deeply paranoid class fable. Despite the intertextual nods to The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and Deliverance (1972)—the latter
film even directly namechecked in the dialogue—the isolated rural setting and narrative trajectory of Wrong Turn lack the allegorical potency of its generic antecedents and subscribes to only the most tediously reactionary of horror motifs. While
a number of recent films have offered (to varying degrees) more intriguing variations on the rural-horror theme—among them The Blair Witch Project (1999), Jeepers Creepers (2001) and its 2003 sequel, Cabin Fever (2003), House of Wax (2005),
Timber Falls (2007) and, in particular, the intelligent remake of The Hills Have Eyes
(2006)—Wrong Turn’s schematic moral agenda and its regressive economies of
gender, class, and race are practically bereft of any redeeming attributes.
Finding themselves isolated deep in the Appalachian region of West Virginia
with their transport sabotaged, the recently graduated medical student Chris Flynn
(Desmond Harrington) and a vacationing group of college friends—ostensibly
headed by the willful Jessie (Eliza Dushku)—head into the woods to try and find
a telephone. Meanwhile, as the rest of the party venture off, young couple Francine
(Lindy Booth) and Evan (Kevin Zegers) wait with the stranded vehicles. Killing
time as they await their friends’ return, Francine is continually associated with an
excessive orality: she repeatedly smokes cigarettes and marijuana and verbally initiates sex with Evan before descending to his crotch to perform oral sex. Later, while
the couple attempt to salvage what they can from the damaged vehicles, Francine
vocalizes to Evan that she can’t find anything to eat in Chris’s wrecked car while
covertly stuffing confectionary into her mouth. The film’s punitive agenda is made

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abundantly clear when, in a repeat of the film’s opening tableau featuring the brutal and entirely unmotivated murder of an affluent young couple, Evan and Francine subsequently become the second pair of unwitting middle-class victims of the
region’s inbred “mountain men.” Given that her murder takes places off-screen, our
next glimpse of Francine is particularly overdetermined. As her bloody corpse is
dragged into a rough shack that serves as home to the mountain men, a graphic
close-up reveals that Francine’s mouth and lower face have been grotesquely mutilated by a barbed wire noose wrapped around her head. Unceremoniously dumped
directly in front of Chris and Jessie’s eyeline as they cower unseen under a bed, Francine’s body is then in turn crudely heaved onto a table and, for no apparent reason,
methodically hacked to pieces by one of her lumpen assailants.
Lacking the self-reflexive humor of the Scream cycle or the sustained and
impressively sardonic tone of Cherry Falls (2000), the absence of comedy in Wrong
Turn is in some ways more typical of teen horror in the 2000s; yet it is this apparent seriousness that also confirms the film’s ideological brutality. Indeed, the basic
premise of a group of utterly unsympathetic rural subalterns preying on unsuspecting white middle-class holidaymakers is problematic in itself9; however, when the
terrified young adults discover a hidden glade filled with unused vehicles belonging
to earlier victims it transpires that the racially ambiguous mountain men lack even
an economic motive to attack their victims. While this scene ostensibly functions
to obscure the class paranoia at stake here, it also underscores the moral, ideological, and socioeconomic otherness of the Wrong Turn’s inbred underclass monsters.
One might suggest at this juncture that Wrong Turn’s scenario—as well as its relative temporal proximity—suggests a bewildered and horrified kneejerk reaction to
9/11’s violent assault on domestic security and Western late-capitalist culture more
broadly. This may well be true on some (unconscious) level, but the film is nevertheless unrelenting in its systematic erasure of difference; indeed, the only obviously
ethnically marked character, Carly (Emmanuelle Chriqui), is rapidly reduced to
little more than a hysterical burden upon her white friends (and is later decapitated
for her troubles). Meanwhile, survivors Chris and Jessie eventually form a tentatively platonic surviving couple, their chaste relationship almost entirely muting the
sultry sexual ambiguity and charismatic postfeminist fortitude that Dushku brings
from her iconic role in gothic teen-soap Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003).
As we hope our brief discussion of Wrong Turn serves to demonstrate, ideological analysis is still an essential tool when critically assessing the politics and
affective investments of contemporary horror. Yet in our view, recent teen horror
is usually more progressive than the likes of Hostel and Wrong Turn would suggest. Indeed, despite the dubious gender politics of those films perhaps the most
welcome development in American horror has been precisely the shift toward the
mode of female address which Dixon both identifies and immediately belittles.

While the assumption that young men constitute horror’s key audience has been
challenged in recent years, it is hardly insignificant that key critical interventions
such as Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws and Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine
both take for granted the assumption that horror is aimed primarily at the fears and
desires of the hetero-masculine psyche.10 Of course, this is due in no small way to
the theoretical limitations of the psychoanalytic models of film spectatorship and
identification which both Creed and Clover mobilize. But it is also perhaps indicative of shifts within the genre itself that these critics’ important volumes increasingly
seem anachronistic when dealing with much contemporary horror. As Valerie Wee
(2006) notes in her analysis of the promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of
the Scream trilogy, it is self-evident that their emotive soap operatics and “femaleoriented perspective” (60) contributed enormously to the cross-gender appeal and
commercial success of the cycle. Whereas key slasher franchises, from the late 1970s
onward such as Halloween, Friday the 13th (1980), and Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984)—all three continuing to the present day—tended to emphasize the return
of the iconic monster in their promotional apparatus, the pre-publicity and DVD
packaging for post-Scream franchises such as I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997–1998), Urban Legend (1998–2005), and Final Destination (2000–2009)
instead foregrounded the troubled (and frequently female) teen protagonists and,
implicitly, the films’ empathetic focus on their physical, emotional, and psychological
suffering, a trend which has since become practically the standard industry model in
the promotion of teen-centric horror films.
With this overt courting of a female demographic also comes a refreshingly
alert (post-)feminist sensibility which both refers back to and updates the protofeminism of the slasher film’s Final Girl from the late 1970s and early 1980s. As
ever, then, recent teen horror adheres primarily to the genre’s enduring emphasis on
heightened subjective experience and psychological perception, appealing to emotional rather than objective realism. Thus, teen horror’s allegorical pop-expressionist
rendering of social experience affectively adheres to Hollywood’s traditional melodramatic mode and its insistence upon on individualizing social trauma through
emotive plotting and character-driven storytelling.
At their most straightforwardly subtextual, of course, victim-identified slasher
films have always on some level addressed and expressionistically engaged with
female anxieties concerning the threat of violent sexual assault. In more recent films,
however, this trope becomes explicit: Scream’s Sidney (Neve Campbell), I Know
What You Did Last Summer’s Julie ( Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Halloween H20’s
(1998) Laurie Strode ( Jamie Lee Curtis) all exhibit recurrent symptoms including
debilitating paranoia and anxiety attacks all-too-similar to those of the post-traumatic suffering of victims of rape and domestic abuse. Even the largely comic plot
of Cherry Falls—whose DVD cover gleefully foregrounds the film’s high-concept

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fusion of Scream and American Pie (1999)—pivots upon a bleak back-story concerning the brutal gang rape of a young woman by, among others, the father of
teen protagonist Jody (Brittany Murphy). The untrustworthiness of young men in
recent teen horror is also underpinned by the genre’s allusions to date rape. Having
unknowingly dated and slept with the young man who raped and murdered her
mother in the trilogy’s first installment, by Scream 3 the iconic Sidney is a hypervigilant, defiantly independent but ultimately reclusive loner. Armed with pepper
spray and hidden away in a secluded Los Angeles safe house, Sidney now works as
an anonymous telephone counsellor for the women’s crisis center.11 This generic preoccupation with the violent and/or sexual abuse of young women is also extended
into other recent films such as Hard Candy (2005), All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
(2006), and Captivity (2007) through to (the admittedly less teen-centric) remake
of The Amityville Horror (2005) and the suggestively titled An American Haunting
(2005), only the most recent in a series of horror texts preoccupied with domestic
sexual abuse which arguably lead back to the influence of David Lynch’s groundbreaking gothic soap opera Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and its big-screen prequel, Fire
Walk With Me (1992).
This heightened emphasis on the potential horrors of heteronormativity also
infuses the postfeminist sensibilities of some of the more intriguing examples of
contemporary teen horror. Valentine (2001), for example, offers a sustained critique
of normative masculinity from a female perspective, illustrating the everyday emotional, psychological, and sexual dysfunction of young manhood by emphasizing
the ideological continuum between everyday chauvinism and the brutal violence
enacted by female hero Kate’s (Marley Shelton) neurotic, alcoholic boyfriend Adam
(played, in a sharp piece of casting, by teen heartthrob David Boreanaz from Buffy the
Vampire Slayer and Angel [1999–2004]). There is arguably a similar critical edge to
the portrayal of selfish and immature youthful masculinities in Cabin Fever (2003),
though, as in Eli Roth’s other films, this is undercut by the filmmaker’s neurotically
persistent association of the female body with abjection. Considerably more interesting is the depiction of female homosociality in The Craft (1996), which, like its
televisual cousin Charmed (1998–2006), is a supernatural parable of female friendship, gendered rage, and sublimated sexual energies that offers a clear and incisive
rebuttal of straight white male heteronormalcy.12 Alienated from male peers and
their casual sexism, the film’s self-styled “bitches of Eastwick” are symptomatic in
their defiant reclamation of “witch” as a proto-feminist term of defiance, intelligence,
and female independence from both men and, implicitly, the social and ideological
panopticon of the heterosexual matrix.
Indeed, if most teen horror is resolutely heterosexual in outlook, The Craft
exemplifies the contra-heteronormative thrust toward what Roz Kaveney dubs “the
polymorphous portrayal of sexual chemistry” (2006, 6) that characterizes the most

interesting contemporary teen movies. Although their difference from standards of
normalcy is expressed primarily through the traditional channels of youthful selfexpression—that is, through consumption and appearance—the young women find
in each other and their supernatural bonds a joyous communal escape from both
their dysfunctional family backgrounds and the dystopian space of high school.13
While the film lacks the courage of its convictions and eventually revels in the subsequent collapse of their quasi-subaltern solidarity, it is the close friendship and
gendered utopia of the film’s midsection that lingers in most viewers’ memories.
Once again, however, the teen horror film offers a distinct female address while
engaging effectively with emotive social issues via its fantastic pretext. The problems
faced by the three central characters are illustrative in this respect: Nancy (Fairuza
Balk) never escapes the trap of her lower-class background despite the death of her
violent, alcoholic father; Rochelle (Rachel True) is repeatedly a victim of casual racism; and Sarah (Robin Tunney) is forced to fend off her duplicitous boyfriend when
he attempts to rape her. Whereas the humorous critique of the social and sexual
inadequacy of straight white masculinity in, say, American Pie eventually leads to a
conservatively reassuring conclusion, Valentine and The Craft explicitly refuse this
dubiously recuperative strategy, both remaining resolute in their gendered social
perspective to the end.14
Of course, one can easily trace teen horror’s ideological dissatisfaction with
social definitions of gendered and sexual normalcy back to the subgenre’s emergence
in the 1950s. However, one key text—Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976)—functions in
our view as one of the most important generic influences on the contemporary teen
horror movie. Carrie’s scathing depiction of the horrors of high school socialization
and its insistence upon the systematic internalization of institutionally sanctioned
misogyny is articulated in emotionally hyperbolic tones, while its hybridized combination of horror, comedy, soap opera melodramatics, and exploitative teen drama
mark it as a significant generic template. Certainly, Carrie is a key influence on The
Craft, with which it shares a preoccupation with the sublimation of female anger
and repressed sexuality, and also with Valentine, which openly alludes to the climactic prom scene from DePalma’s film in its opening minutes. Films such as The
Faculty (1998), Welcome to the Dollhouse, and Elephant also follow Carrie and The
Craft in depicting middle-class suburbia and the high school environment as an
oppressively institutionalized gothic space.
Having acquired a substantial cult following since its release, Ginger Snaps
(2000) is another intriguing film that also updates and develops Carrie’s gendered
horror paradigm.15 A darkly witty tale of female lycanthropy, Ginger Snaps presents
teenage female alienation as a troubled but distinctly oppositional subjective positioning in contrast to the oppressive conventions of feminine heteronormativity. As
sisters Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) pithily dismiss their

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milieu in unambiguously queer terms (“High school’s just a mindless little breeders
machine,” Brigitte rasps, “a hormonal toilet”), the film ambivalently endorses their
apparently self-willed refusal to begin their menstrual cycles and succumb to the
abject social and physical prison of adult womanhood. Ginger Snaps’ explicit references to genre classics such as Cat People (1942) and Carrie are not simply instances
of smug postmodern posturing, however; the film deliberately engages with and
celebrates the genre’s long-term investment in subjectively expressing and empathizing with marginalized female experience. Thus, Ginger Snaps’ vision of normative
female heterosexuality as precisely a curse, a form of monstrous possession, offers
an incisive critique of the limitations of gender roles and the (hetero)sexual doublestandard (“A girl can only be a slut, bitch, tease, or the virgin next door,” seethes Ginger), while the eponymous protagonist’s dark wit and righteous social fury coupled
with the film’s mournful conclusion offer a compellingly bleak vision of gendered
dis-ease. “I get this ache,” Ginger confesses to her sister, “I thought it was for sex, but
it’s to tear everything to fucking pieces.”
Whereas Ginger’s gendered rage and frustration is aimed at “everything,” tearing more specific things to pieces is the thematic epicenter of Mitchell Lichtenstein’s
Teeth (2007). As an exemplar of many of the most compelling aspects of contemporary teen horror, Teeth offers a potent combination of deliciously black humor,
graphic horror, and social critique in its often impressively sensitive portrayal of
the emotional and psychological pitfalls of female adolescence, bodily insecurity,
and sexual coming-of-age. As such, Teeth functions as an intelligent (post-)feminist
movie mobilizing dark comedy and recurrent images of penile trauma to explore
serious youth-oriented social issues, simultaneously literalizing, deconstructing,
and celebrating the vagina dentata myth. Positively brimming with nuanced allusions to genre conventions and Freudian imagery and motifs, Teeth offers no shortage of incisive social commentary and meta-generic theoretical bite. Following the
protagonist Dawn ( Jess Weixler) through progressive mutation from a timid and
defiantly virginal member of an evangelical chastity group to an independent and
physically confident young woman, Teeth’s satire of suburban sexual development
moves beyond the relatively easy target of religious oppression and, much like Carrie, offers a sweeping critique of both the casual and institutionalized misogyny
that Dawn encounters. From the film’s opening tableau, in which an infant Dawn is
coerced by her older stepbrother Brad ( John Hensley) into “playing” I’ll-show-youmine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours, Teeth presents growing up in American suburbia as,
in no uncertain terms, a socio-sexual battleground. Although his early encounter
with his sister’s evolutionary defense mechanism leaves him (literally) scarred (and
with a penchant for aggressive anal sex driven by latent castration anxiety),16 Brad’s
contempt for women is represented as merely the most extreme form of the misogyny that characterizes the protagonist’s social world. Indeed, with the exception

of her stepfather, all Dawn’s encounters with the normative masculine psyche are
overwhelmingly negative: the apparently sensitive and caring would-be boyfriend
Tobey (Hale Appleman) effectively attempts to rape Dawn after she is knocked
unconscious as a result of his forceful and unwanted sexual advances; long-term
admirer Ryan (Ashley Springer) poses as the sexually attentive hero who will conquer the “dark crucible” of femininity but, after plying Dawn with sedatives and
champagne, is unveiled mid-coitus as a shallow and manipulative braggart; while
Brad’s long-term, quasi-incestuous desire for his stepsister is treated, like her other
suitors, with suitably masticatory contempt. In one of Teeth’s most discomfiting
sequences, a deeply insecure and anxious Dawn puts her faith in a medical examination in an attempt to clarify her physical abnormality. In keeping with the film’s
skeptical attitude toward the sexually exploitative duplicity of male figures, Dr.
Godfrey ( Josh Pais) is both hideously patronizing and lecherous (a cut reveals him
covertly removing his surgical glove before carrying out an internal examination),
and the entire procedure is sympathetically represented as humiliating, degrading,
and physically painful. Indeed, the overall tone of Teeth is at once angry, tender,
disturbing, and playful, and given the film’s overt feminist (self-)consciousness it
perhaps comes as no surprise that the most moving scenes in the film are, first, those
between Dawn and her terminally ill mother; and second, the revelatory moment
when Dawn comes face-to-face with the beguiling anatomical beauty of the female
sexual organs in a previously censored textbook diagram (although, this time, reassuringly sans teeth).
In a fashion similar to the representation of the high school environment as an
oppressive ideological prison in films like Ginger Snaps and Teeth, The Faculty offers
a comically nightmarish depiction of the educational apparatus as the ideological
epicenter of normative socialization. Like Ginger Snaps, The Faculty presents adults
and adulthood as something terrifyingly “other” and literally alien, reworking the
central conceit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) in which the transformation into one of “Them” is depicted as one of monstrously alienated conformity and
the systematic annihilation of difference.17 To this end, the saccharine conclusion in
which the film’s collective of heroically marginalized outsiders—including iconic
young actors Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, and Clea DuVall—triumph over the
alien invaders is delivered with a deliberate, almost Sirkian irony. As Timothy Shary
(2002) and Andy W. Smith (2007) point out, all the lead characters surrender what
made them interesting in the first place: the eternal nerd (Wood) becomes a sexually desired celebrity; the sexually ambivalent and ambiguously gendered tomboy
Stokely (DuVall) enthusiastically embraces heteronormativity and embarks on a
relationship with the film’s requisite jock; and the intelligently rebellious outsider
Zeke abandons pharmaceutical experimentation in favor of joining the football
team. That the conclusion of The Faculty is effectively a satirical homage to the teen

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“classic” The Breakfast Club (1985) only confirms the film’s ambivalent critique of
the ideological colonization and crushing self-delusion imposed by normative social
interpellation.
This use of intra-generational conflict as a metaphor for the eternal tension
between social assimilation and individual autonomy is, of course, hardly a recent
development in youth-oriented horror fare. Yet one the most interesting aspects of
the genre in the last decade has been the insistent marginalization of adults from
this youthful milieu. While parents and other authority figures have long been represented as bumbling, ineffectual, and conspicuously absent when needed the most,
parental presence in the horror film has more recently become even less tangible.
Of course, it has frequently been suggested that the supposed breakdown of the
nuclear family unit as the core component of American society manifests itself in
the mise-en-scène of contemporary horror, a world which is—in familial terms, at
least—often fractured, dysfunctional, and emotionally awry. Symptomatic of this is
recent teen horror’s frequent representation of self-sufficient siblings at the heart of
their narratives: Ginger Snaps, Jeepers Creepers, House of Wax, Cursed, The Hamiltons
(2006), and The Hills Have Eyes all explicitly pivot around such relationships, for
example. The opening section of Jeepers Creepers, featuring a protracted but stilted
conversation between brother and sister Daryll ( Justin Long) and Trish Jenner
(Gina Phillips), is exemplary in its subtle intimations of domestic and interpersonal
disquiet. Indeed, the belated appearance of the film’s “reaper” is best understood on
some level as a monstrous return of the emotionally repressed: a gothic manifestation of the unspoken tensions between the two characters. And just as The Craft
ambivalently offered the girlfriends’ proto-coven as a gendered escape from familial
dysfunction, so too does Wes Craven’s Cursed intimate a contra-heteronormative
future for the family unit. At the film’s conclusion, parentless siblings Ellie (Christina Ricci) and Jimmy ( Jesse Eisenberg) have broken free of the lycanthropic curse
that has haunted them and form an alternative familial collective with their pet
dog and recently outed gay friend Bo (Milo Ventimiglia). Having rejected serial
monogamy and vanquished her troubled relationship with her possessive and overbearing boyfriend Jake ( Joshua Jackson), Ellie ends Cursed content and happily outside the strictures of the heterosexual matrix, functioning instead as the benevolent
matriarch of a progressive and wholly inclusive post-nuclear collective. In The Hamiltons, however, this gothic reformulation of the nuclear family unit is presented in
somewhat darker terms. Here, a group of vampiric and incestuous siblings strive to
maintain domestic unity and economic survival by reducing their relationship to
human beings not related by biology to one of predator and (necessary) prey. The
film’s critique of the primacy of blood-ties and its metaphors of social vampirism
and reified alienation—epitomized by the siblings’ murderously antisocial rejection
of any moral or empathetic association beyond the ties that bind—systematically

challenges the “normality” of the family unit. Just as the eldest sibling and would-be
patriarch comically asserts that the Hamiltons are “just trying to be an ordinary
family,” the film offers an ambivalent and strangely melancholy assessment of the
deep-rooted sociopathology involved in the pursuit of domestic and/or suburban
normalcy.18
While teen horror’s frequent evacuation of adults from its thematic mise-enscène is certainly indicative on one level of the consistently narcissistic preoccupations of the teenpic, this structuring absence also necessarily allows its audience to
vicariously work through collective fears and anxieties. The successful Final Destination franchise, for example, is notable for both its virtually adult-free fantasy
universe and the series’ gallows humor and progressively more gruesome aesthetic.
However, it is clear that the morbid dread which underpins each of the films in the
cycle returns compulsively to the same subject matter: premature death. Given the
fantastic premise of the series—that “Death” can be cheated if one remains hypervigilant and works out its malevolent “design”—we would agree with Peter Hutchings’s assertion that the Final Destination films function on one level as reassuring
fantasies underpinned by youthful disavowal. What is perhaps most interesting
about the cycle, then, is its insistence upon the terrifyingly banal manner in which
young life can be casually snuffed out. As ever, horror ritualistically confronts its
audience with the adult realities of mortality, grief, and psychological anguish, and
to this end we would argue that the Final Destination series does indeed function on
some levels as a melodramatic return of the Real which temporarily punctures the
fantasmatic and insular bubble of affluent middle-class youth. By the third installment, the series was reflexively highlighting itself as a virtual thrill ride by opening
with a spectacularly fatal rollercoaster accident, and while it is certainly true that
the Final Destination films share with Stay Alive (2006) the internal logic of video
games (wherein avoiding death is precisely a matter of skill, intelligence, and guile),
it is their compulsive return to the spectacle—and aftermath—of unexpected death
that marks their core appeal.19
Although we have attempted to offer a more optimistic summary of teen horror over the last ten years or so, it would be disingenuous to overlook some of the
genre’s more glaring limitations. Most obviously there is the almost unremitting
whiteness of teen horror’s on-screen representations of American youth. Somewhat
notoriously, Scream 2 opens with an arch and characteristically reflexive sequence
in which two African American characters, Phil (Omar Epps) and Maureen ( Jada
Pinkett Smith), attend a theatrical screening of the movie’s film-within-the-film,
Stab. Echoing Sidney’s racially blank dismissal of slasher films in the first film
(“What’s the point? They’re all the same: some stupid killer stalking some bigbreasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should
be running out the front door. It’s insulting!”), Maureen complains that the film

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will inevitably be a “dumb-ass white movie” and that “the horror genre is historical for excluding African-American elements.” A few minutes later, both characters
are butchered in a theater filled with white audience members gleefully wearing
ghost-face masks. Given the humorously reflexive generic logic of the film, Maureen is ostensibly murdered due to her po-faced refusal to take the genre seriously;
however, there is also an unpleasant sense that she is killed precisely for the crime
of speaking race within the predominately white generic milieu she critiques. We
do not quite claim here that Scream 2 is necessarily guilty of “ironic” racism at this
juncture, but in mobilizing this double move it is certainly guilty of a frustrating
incoherence on this subject. Indeed, when the film clearly suggests Maureen’s vocal
discontent with the ideological shortcomings of horror films to be little more than
pseudo-political racial posturing—given Maureen’s avowed stance, her boyfriend
understandably mocks her preferred viewing choice of a (very WASP-ish) Sandra
Bullock star vehicle—Scream 2 seems even more culpable of hiding behind its own
inscrutable “ghost face.”20 (That Sidney’s college roommate Hallie (Elise Neal) is
also black—and also meets a predictably bloody end—only adds to the politically
muddied water.)
Indeed, this problematic attitude to race seems largely endemic to recent teen
horror: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) is notable as one of the
very few teen horror films that contains central African American characters, while
Jeepers Creepers 2 is an intermittently interesting film that offers a critique of narcissistically aggressive white masculinity and the subsequent racial tensions among the
film’s stranded high school football team. Yet any sustained commentary on race is
casually displaced by the film’s disappointingly relentless tone of homosexual panic
as the predatory reaper gazes desirously at the toned and athletic bodies of the fearful male protagonists. Urban Legend and Halloween H20 (both 1998) feature African
American adults (played by Loretta Devine and L.L. Cool J) who survive the respective murderous onslaught; both, however, are little more than bumbling caricatures:
tokenistic figures whose primary function in the narrative is to (ineptly) protect
white teens. Such consistent generic limitations in terms of racial representation are
almost certainly why the preternaturally calm figure of Benny (Bennie Dixon)—the
sole African American student we encounter in Elephant—is so haunting: generically, we know he is doomed. As such, watching Benny’s quietly determined stroll
toward his inevitable fate it is difficult not to see his wordlessly oneiric demeanor as
a direct allusion to the hypnotic Carre-Four’s (Darby Jones) striking liminal presence in the fiercely intelligent and racially charged genre classic I Walked With a
Zombie (1943).21
It hardly needs stating that teen horror is also for the most part unrelentingly
and unapologetically middle class in both focus and sensibility. The Craft and My
Little Eye (2002) stand out as two of the few films to make the disparity between the

socioeconomic backgrounds of its protagonists a key thematic point in the narrative. My Little Eye is also arguably the forerunner in the recent cycle of films offering
(with varying degrees of success) a critical look at the numbing reification and ethical vacuity of late capitalism, a cycle not coincidentally preoccupied with the use and
abuse of new visual and communication technologies and which includes the Hostel
films, Captivity and Vacancy (both 2007), and George Romero’s timely “teenification” of his ongoing zombie saga in Diary of the Dead (2007). The two films in the
briefly popular I Know What You Did Last Summer cycle also offer the intriguing
possibility that what really haunts the troubled teens is less guilt over their youthful transgressions per se and more their psychological inability (and, in the case of
Freddie Prinz Jr.’s character, Ray, the literal socioeconomic inability) to transcend
the socioeconomic trappings of the small working-class fishing town where they
grew up. Eternally stalked by a menacing figure clad in industrial fisherman’s garb,
both films are best understood as affective psychodramas that indicate a somewhat more emotionally realistic examination of class consciousness and socioeconomic guilt than can be found in, say, Wrong Turn or the equally hysterical When a
Stranger Calls (2006).22 Similarly, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of My Bloody
Valentine (2009) is its generically uncharacteristic temporal shift from an initially
hedonistic teen milieu. Indeed, the film’s sustained depiction of a blue-collar small
town characterized by socioeconomic entrapment for those selfsame youth now in
thirty-something adulthood is infinitely more powerful than its banal quasi-slasher
motifs. Elsewhere, in their neo-Orientalism and narrative actualization of (racist)
urban myths both Turistas (2006) and The Ruins (2008) follow the Hostel movies
in articulating a socioeconomically paranoid and distinctly xenophobic attitude to
that which lies outside the boundaries of the United States. Turistas, in particular,
opens with painfully crass visual shorthand for the presumed horrors of an impoverished Latin America: stray dogs, poor transportation, and—worst of all—public
breastfeeding. Meanwhile, it is barely coincidental that Kiko (Agles Steib), the sole
Brazilian native to befriend the “arrogant gringo tourists,” is a young man whose
trustworthiness is signified primarily through his determination to “improve” (read:
Westernize) himself by learning to speak English. While all of these films to an
extent engage critically with the gulf between the casual affluence of their young
protagonists and the everyday poverty and social deprivation they encounter abroad,
the specter of global inequality and Western exploitation is rapidly exorcised when
these “innocently” wealthy and attractive teens are assaulted by malevolent indigents
from foreign lands. The conclusion of Turistas is emblematic in this respect, with
one of the few survivors sagely advising another young tourist who wants to explore
the inner country by bus to “take the plane” instead. Here be dragons, indeed.
Finally, just as the teen horror film’s class and racial economies are symptomatic
of Hollywood representation more broadly, so too are the genre’s heterosexism and

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relentless fetishism of (in particular) young female bodies. While we have earlier
noted the proto-queer subtexts evident in films such as Ginger Snaps and The Craft,
a throwaway gag in The Faculty about a bootleg video in circulation featuring naked
footage of Neve Campbell and Jennifer Love Hewitt is certainly indicative of the
knowing exploitation mentality of contemporary teen horror and its foregrounding of attractive young stars. The promotional material for Turistas, for example,
largely consisted of images of nubile bikini-clad twenty-somethings, while Elisha
Cuthbert’s—star of TV’s popular 24 (2001–)—roles in both House of Wax and
Captivity seem troublingly predicated on a systematically punitive psychosexual
logic. Although Captivity offers a somewhat superficial critique of the beauty myth,
and briefly attempts to draw parallels between the reification and objectification
of the glamour industry and the brutal punishment enacted by the protagonist’s
torturers, the film as a whole is uneasily schizophrenic in tone. In one particular
moment of misogynistic Grand Guignol, the imprisoned actress-cum-model Jennifer (Cuthbert) is force-fed blended entrails in a cruel parody of her earlier consumption of a nourishing health drink. Lacking the intriguingly perverse morality
and ponderous ethical dimensions of the successful Saw (2004–) cycle to which it
is clearly indebted, Captivity’s visual pleasure in foregrounding threats to Jennifer’s
physical beauty seems grounded in gleeful sadism and a clear delight in punishing
female “narcissism.” While the latter stages of the film attempt to displace this psychosexual gratification onto the warped psyche of Jennifer’s assailants, their glibly
Oedipal back-story—in a film overflowing with allusions to Psycho, it is no surprise
that their animosity toward women stems from sexual abuse at the hands of their
mother—only seems to add to the misogyny of the piece. Moreover, just as Captivity foregrounds its own reflexive interest in the cult of celebrity via its young starlet
( Jennifer may as well be Cuthbert), so too does Paris Hilton’s cameo in House of
Wax offer a problematic dual address. In perhaps the most memorable sequence
of a largely undistinguished film, Hilton’s character meets her demise when she is
orally impaled upon a lengthy metal rod. As the film cuts to a graphic close-up of
Hilton’s open mouth sliding suggestively down the bloody pole, her murderer also
begins to film his victim’s grotesquely sexual death-throes on a hand-held camera.
In a scene that famously provoked cheers and applause from theatrical audiences,
House of Wax alludes quite transparently—and vindictively—to the notorious
celebrity’s widely circulated “sex tape.” Like Cuthbert’s sadistic treatment in Captivity, however, the film’s obvious relish at this point leaves the viewer, like poor Paris,
with a bad taste in the mouth. This brief critique of Captivity and House of Wax is
not to dismiss teen horror’s engagement with youthful desire and sexual expression
out-of-hand, however. Whereas Thomas Doherty sees recent teen films’ attitude to
sexual contact as being overshadowed by the specter of AIDS, we would suggest in

contradistinction that films such as Cherry Falls offer a somewhat more liberal and
celebratory vision of youthful sexuality, what we would tentatively (if, admittedly,
somewhat reluctantly) dub a post-AIDS sensibility. Yet the genre is certainly not
naïve on this point: films as diverse as Cabin Fever, Cursed, Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and
the aforementioned Cherry Falls all deal with sexually transmitted infection (and
the avoidance thereof ) with varying degrees of opacity, wit, and intelligence.

Co n c lu s i o n: Lo o k i n g B ac k wa r d, Lo o k i n g F o r wa r d
Just like the camera in Elephant, then, Hollywood’s recent horror output insistently
prowls the social, psychological, and emotional corridors of contemporary American youth. In contradistinction to critics of recent developments within the genre,
we would argue that it is—at best—simply misguided to project leftist longings
onto contemporary teen horror only, and inevitably, to find it wanting. Indeed, what
is so striking about the hallowed horror films of the late 1960s and 1970s is less their
articulation of any kind of coherent politically oppositional stance and more their
(entirely symptomatic) outright nihilism. In other words, we suggest that the affective appeal of contemporary teen horror needs to be understood on its own terms—a
hybridized generic lexicon, perhaps outside the critical remit of enthusiasts enamored with earlier stages in the American horror film’s historical development.
However, one element of recent horror does strike us as being indicative of the
necessity for cautious optimism where American horror’s future is concerned. A
recurrent trope in films that have emerged since the military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a melodramatic insistence upon the innocence of young
Americans in the face of their various aggressors. While this does on some level
indicate a form of sociopolitical disavowal, recent youth-oriented remakes of The
Fog (2005) and The Hills Have Eyes foreground a refusal to be associated with the
sins of the fathers and a resistance to the key horror motif of history repeating itself.
If recent horror films—from Scream to Elephant and beyond—have often depicted
the social experience of American youth as akin to being trapped within a horror
movie, then the genre has also begun tentatively to indicate a way out, a way to
escape the inescapability of the past. These gothic melodramas about youthful
trauma may maintain that, to paraphrase Cursed’s Ellie, (social) life is a curse. But
they also ensure that their engagements with this affective agenda follow the directive to “have fun,” to work through their concerns via the reflexive serious play of
youth culture. Like teen horror as a whole this stance certainly has its limitations,
but it also offers cautious cause for optimism about the future direction of the genre
and, hopefully, American culture more broadly.

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N ot e s
1. With the Virginia Tech massacre of April 2007 still fresh in the memory, it was reported
that five people were shot (including the suicide of the perpetrator) at SuccessTech high school
in Cleveland, Ohio, during the first drafts of this paper in early October 2007. There have been
at least five reported shootings at U.S. educational establishments since then, including (most
recently and most seriously at the time of writing) six deaths at Northern Illinois University in
February 2008.
2. See Diane Negra, “An American Werewolf in London,“ America First: Naming the Nation
in U.S. Film, ed. Many Merck (London: Routledge, 2007), for a lively discussion of the politics of
“European misadventure” films.
3. See Kim Newman, “Torture Garden,” Sight and Sound 16.6 ( June 2006), for a useful
commentary on Hostel and a summary of torture iconography in horror films more broadly. As
he suggests, the final stages of Hostel are indicative of Roth’s “lazy writing and direction, and any
sense that an important issue is being touched upon gets lost [. . .] The veiled message is that
torture is an atrocity when perpetrated on Americans but is justified when used by Americans
against those they deem responsible for starting the conflict [. . .] which is perilously close to
being George W. Bush’s foreign policy than the premise for a box-office shocker” (31).
4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre eventually grossed $80,148,261 at the domestic box office.
Source: www.imdb.com.
5. For example, Scream featured Neve Campbell from Party of Five (1994–2000) and
Courtney Cox from Friends (1994–2004); I Know What You Did Last Summer starred Jennifer
Love Hewitt (also from Party of Five) and Sarah Michelle Gellar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer;
Joshua Jackson from Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003) stars in Urban Legend, Cursed, and Scream 2;
The Fog featured Maggie Grace from Lost (2004–) and Tom Welling from Smallville (2001–);
while House of Wax included key actors from 24, The Simple Life (2003–2007), and One Tree Hill
(2003–).
6. Williamson’s teen-soap credentials were established in his work on the popular television
show Dawson’s Creek. In addition to writing Scream and Scream 2 (and producing Scream 3), he
also wrote screenplays for I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, and Cursed.
7. For a detailed discussion of “subcultural capital” and its centrality to contemporary youth
culture, see Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1995); for more on the pleasures and (sub)cultural functions of repeat viewings and
domestic technologies, see Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and
the Home (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
8. See Andrew Tudor, “From Paranoia to Postmodernism? The Horror Movie in Late
Modern Society,” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: British
Film Institute, 2002) and Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow: Pearson Education,
2004). For a sympathetic reading of Scream—albeit one that relies heavily on the concept of
postmodernism—see Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), 163–80.
9. We appropriate the term “subaltern” here from Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffry Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers,
1971). Gramsci’s use of the term has most frequently been read as a quasi-Marxist euphemism
for the proletariat, but “subaltern” has a protean critical history and has also been taken to apply
to other marginal social groups (such as sexual and ethnic minorities, for example), which
would seem appropriate to Wrong Turn’s “monsters” on a number of levels. We would like to

distinguish our usage at this specific juncture from elsewhere in the essay when the term is
occasionally mobilized in reference to (middle-class) American youth. Given the expressionistic
underpinnings of horror, “subaltern” is here intended as a subjective metaphor for the liminality
and (perceived) marginality of adolescence and associated subcultural groupings.
10. See, for example, Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures
of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Brigid Cherry,
“Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film,” Identifying Hollywood’s
Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London:
British Film Institute, 1999); and Valerie Wee, “Resurrecting and Updating the Teen Slasher: The
Case of Scream,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 34.2 (2006), on the pleasures of horror
films for female viewers.
11. For more on the gender politics of the Scream cycle and its relationship to postfeminism,
see Kathryn Rowe Karlyn, “Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism’s Third Wave: “I’m Not My
Mother,” Genders Online Journal 38 (2003), http://www.genders.org/g38/g38_rowe_karlyn.html.
12. For an interesting discussion of Charmed and the relationship between “witchcraft”
and communal postfeminism, see Hannah E. Sanders, “Living a Charmed Life: The Magic of
Postfeminist Sisterhood,” Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture,
ed. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
13. Steve Bailey and James Hay, “Cinema and the Premises of Yuth; ‘Teen Films’ and Their
Sites in the 1980s and 1990s,” Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: British
Film Institute, 2002), rightly note that, in recent teen cinema, “there is a post-liberal acceptance of
the absolute primacy of the commodity system and that practices of self-development and selfdiscipline cannot be separated from this logic” (232). Their comment that the shopping mall has
become “the metaphorical location for the assumption of a mature lifestyle” (227) is exemplified
in the closing sequences of celebrated teen comedy Superbad (2007), where the central male
protagonists reluctantly sacrifice the comforts of adolescent homosociality for their predetermined
heterosexual trajectories amid the commodified interpellations of the shopping mall.
14. For more on the representation of masculinity in American Pie and other teen movies,
see David Greven, “Contemporary Teen Comedies and New Forms of American Masculinity,”
Cineaste 27.3 (2002): 14–21.
15. For more on the cult reputation of Ginger Snaps and its sequels, see M. Barker, E.
Mathijs, and X. Mendik, “Menstrual Monsters: The Reception of the Ginger Snaps Cult Horror
Franchise,” The Cult Film Reader, ed. Ernest Mathjis and Xavier Mendik (Maidenhead: Open
University Press, 2008).
16. As reviewer Isabel Stevens notes, the film offers two broadly “realistic” explanations for
Dawn’s genital mutation: “the result of the nuclear power station that looms over the tree-lined
streets, or a Darwinian case of adapt-to-survive” (78).
17. Similarly, Abel Ferrera’s stylish and effective remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—
Body Snatchers (1993)—reworks the central trope of the film directly in terms of the domestic,
social and—given the film’s setting on a military base and its temporal proximity to the Persian
Gulf War—national alienation experienced by the film’s young female protagonist, played by
Gabrielle Anwar.
18. See Nathan Holmes, “Playing House: Screen Teens and the Dreamworld of Suburbia,”
A Family Affair: Cinema Comes Home, ed. Murray Pomerance (London: Wallflower, 2008), for
an intriguing commentary on the ways in which American cinema has repeatedly depicted the
“failed utopia” of suburbia as an expressionistic stage “upon which middle-class anxiety, desire,
perversity, frustration and alienation are performed” (250).

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19. That the spectatorial pleasures of the Final Destination series are marked by a fantasmatic
generic economy of mastery/lack (akin in no small way to Freud’s account of the infantile
psychology at play in the fort/da “game”) was underscored by the DVD release of Final
Destination 3, which included a special feature allowing viewers to “change the course of the film
and characters fates.” Just like the Final Destination movies’ narratives, then, the DVD insisted
upon the possibility that youthful viewers can, if they so choose, “take control of the ride!”
20. This very postmodern sense of ideologically “having it both ways” is also typified by
Scream’s now-iconic ghost-face mask derived from Munch’s “The Scream” (1893). The mask serves
as a witty comment on the casual commodification of (teenage) angst just as the Scream franchise
itself commercially exploits that selfsame angst. Inevitably, the very mask made famous by the
Scream franchise is now an ancillary product readily available to purchase outside the diegesis of
the films.
21. For a fascinating reading of the racial politics of I Walked With a Zombie, see Alexander
Nemerov, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2005): 97–131.
22. James Morrison, “Hostages and Houseguests: Class and Family in the New Screen
Gothic,” A Family Affair: Cinema Comes Home, ed. Murray Pomerance (London: Wallflower
Press, 2008), makes a compelling case for the “expedient synthesis of hysteria and smugness”
which characterizes a recent spate of gothic-tinged American films concerned with assaults on
the domestic sphere, which are, he argues, ideologically predicated on “a largely disavowed class
consciousness” (190).

“Lov e d t h e O r i g i n a l, H at e d t h e R e ma k e”
Long before and quite apart from the self-referential “rules” expounded
in Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy or the lesson-instilling “games” orchestrated by the
Jigsaw killer in the Saw franchise, horror movies in general—and slasher movies
in particular—have been in the business of helping viewers reconcile themselves
to some of life’s cold, hard facts. To cite a personal example: as I am not a virginal
teenage girl, I know that the odds of my surviving an encounter with a masked,
knife-, axe-, or chainsaw-wielding maniac are slim to none. Furthermore, I know
that a willingness on my part to make self-conscious, self-deprecating references to
popular culture and cinematic conventions—regardless of how such references may
both thwart my chances of coital success and endear me to the audience—will do
little to improve those odds.
Another important and rather more academic lesson I have learned in the
school of slash-and-gash is how difficult it can be to appraise a remake on “its own
merits” if you have seen the original. As a result, a critical tendency when dealing
with remakes in general is to establish a pretense of objectivity, often by declaring
an admiration for the original at outset. This tendency comes out most clearly—
and, perhaps, honestly—in user comments and reviews found on Web sites like the
Internet Movie Database and Ain’t It Cool News, which manage to claim an outright
distaste for the trend of remaking major horror movies while maintaining that each
new remake has been given the benefit of the doubt and been viewed with an open
mind. Yet in spite of such disclaimers, many reviews both professional and amateur
proceed nonetheless—and usually unintentionally—to judge the new film in relation to the original.
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It must be said that there are many other genres from which one could arrive
at similar conclusions. Horror certainly has no monopoly on remakes, and thus no
monopoly on the ways in which remakes are appraised. I would, however, argue that
the tendency to judge remakes in relation to originals is part of a natural, cognitive
process. We appraise all movies to some degree based on our experiences, be they
from our everyday lives—“it just wasn’t realistic” being a common criticism—or
from other movies we have seen. A remake simply provides us with a more concrete
background against which to measure a film. What is more, one could certainly
argue that, in the case of the horror genre, this tendency is fed not only by a propensity for remakes but also a preponderance of sequels and, more generally, sets
of expectations based on familiarity with the genre and its conventions. All genres
have conventions, certainly, but there is a fair amount of truth to the old cliché that
there is always an audience for horror—the notion that there exists a particular
audience that frequents horror movies on a consistent basis.
None of this is particularly groundbreaking, of course, and so a more interesting question is how to productively examine and articulate the similarities and
differences between remakes and originals while maintaining a degree of generic
specificity. To that end, what I first propose to do in this piece is to carry out a
comparative analysis of a recent horror remake and its original by adapting the critical approach employed by the literary philosopher Tzvetan Todorov in his seminal
1970 study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Following this,
I shall expand my inquiry to consider the role of the fantastic in the broader cyclical
contexts of both the original and the remake.
Making use of Todorov’s articulation of the fantastic in the context of an examination of the horror movie is by no means an original conceit. Many syllabi for film
courses on the horror genre feature Todorov’s text, and several writers, including
Noël Carroll and Dudley Andrew, have discussed the fantastic in relation to cinema. But what is at least halfway original—for reasons I shall detail in due course—
is my choice of which films to examine.

T wo H a l low e e n s
Perhaps the most notorious, polarizing horror remake of recent years—in terms
of both the very idea of attempting a remake and the realization of that notion—
is heavy-metal-musician-turned-moviemaker Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of John
Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween. From his effort at reimagining the origin of serial
killer Michael Myers it is clear that Zombie understood the task he faced, even if his
attempt at crafting a film that balances reverence for the original with updates and
innovation—or perhaps his own personal vision—was not judged to be successful.

Rather than release the movie on or around October 31, where it would face
stiff competition from Saw IV, the distributors of the new Halloween chose to open
the film on the final Friday of August, which is considered by American studios to
be the last weekend of summer. Despite receiving a drubbing by critics, Halloween
took top spot at the box office, earning a respectable $26 million in its opening
weekend before being dethroned the following week by another genre remake, 3:10
to Yuma ( James Mangold), thus beginning a quick slide into box office obscurity.
Before turning to an analysis of the two Halloweens, however, a brief introduction to some of Todorov’s ideas about the fantastic is in order. Essentially, works of
the fantastic involve what Todorov calls an uncanny event, a mysterious or strange
narrative occurrence that provokes a “hesitation” in both the story’s protagonist and
the reader—or, in our case, the viewer. Writes Todorov:
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained
by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event
must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of imagination—and the laws of the world
remain as they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral
part of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.
Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings—with this reservation, that we encounter him
infrequently. (25)
The fantastic can occur only so long as a hesitation between the two solutions
is sustained. Hence, the fantastic exists on the frontier of two neighboring genres:
the marvelous and the uncanny. In the former, the event in question is accounted
for as supernatural in origin. In the latter, the event—no matter how unusual or
disquieting it may be—is explained in terms of the laws of the natural world.
Here it is important to distinguish between Todorov’s use of “uncanny” and
the term’s more familiar psychoanalytic usage subsequent to Sigmund Freud’s influential 1919 essay on the subject. Oddly, Todorov makes no reference to his parallel
use of the term, save for a single, brief aside, writing that “there is not an entire
coincidence between Freud’s use of the term and our own” (47). What is more—
more confusing, potentially—he uses “uncanny” both as an adjective (viz., “uncanny
event”) to describe a particular narrative occurrence and as the proper name of one
of the fantastic’s neighboring genres.
Common to Freud’s conception of the uncanny and Todorov’s adjectival use is
the idea of an experience or event provoking a feeling of uneasiness, where the familiar seems strange and the strange familiar. For Todorov, however, this sensation is

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not a symptom of a deep-seated neurosis—of the author or of one of the narrative’s
characters—that it then becomes the analyst’s or the critic’s task to interpret using
the tools of psychoanalysis. Indeed, he cautions in his concluding chapter against
such a procedure, warning “the too-direct application of a method in a realm other
than its own results in the reiteration of the initial presuppositions” (152). Todorov
is instead concerned with the thematic and structural implications of the “hesitation”
that the uncanny event elicits. At stake is a work’s generic classification—uncanny,
fantastic, marvelous—based on which we can examine the work in relation to others like it.
Many stories deliberately delay—that is, hesitate—before ascribing events to
either one of the two polar rationales. For example, the revealing at a tale’s conclusion
of a “mastermind” who has been clandestinely orchestrating seemingly paranormal
happenings is a common plot device in both literature and film. In such instances,
events that seem supernatural throughout a story receive a rational explanation in
the end. Conversely, a narrative may conclude with an affirmation or acceptance of
the supernatural—it really was ghosts, monsters, or the devil all along.
Recognizing these cases, Todorov further posits two transitory subgenres and
conceptualizes their relationship using the following diagram:

The median line between fantastic-uncanny and fantastic-marvelous represents the fantastic in its pure state. As Todorov notes, few narratives sustain their
ambiguity to the very end—that is, beyond the narrative itself—so as to achieve this
pure state, but there are examples. One he cites is the Henry James tale The Turn
of the Screw, which “does not permit us to determine finally whether ghosts haunt
the old estate, or whether we are confronted by the hallucinations of a hysterical
governess victimized by the disturbing atmosphere that surrounds her” (43).
My contention is that the original Halloween is an instance of the fantastic,
but that the remake falls into the realm of the uncanny. Whereas Carpenter’s movie
sustains a fantastic hesitation as to the nature of its uncanny event by refusing to
provide a tangible explanation for Michael Myers—the origin of his iniquity, the
nature of his physical power, the motivation for his murderous actions—Zombie’s picture instead opts to account for the killer’s evil using pop psychology. As
explained in the movie by the psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis, Michael’s adolescent
psychopathy is the product of a kind of serial killer recipe: “Michael was created by
a perfect alignment of interior and exterior factors gone violently wrong. A perfect

storm, if you will. Thus creating a psychopath that knows no boundaries, and has
no boundaries.”
A recurring criticism of the remake of Halloween is that the film just isn’t scary.
This is one of the most damning judgments that can be leveled against a horror
movie, especially if one subscribes to the notion of horror as “body genre,” characterized by the elicitation of an intended affective response in the viewer. Personally, I
am content to leave the matter of whether or not the remake is scary—or whether
or not the original is, for that matter—to the individual viewer or critic. Of greater
interest is how the remake attempts to induce this desired effect. To hazard a crude
dichotomy: unlike Carpenter’s original, Zombie’s remake privileges shock over
suspense. As opposed to tension built up in a sustained and formally minimalist
fashion, visceral impact is instead favored throughout. This emphasis points to the
remake’s general orientation. Instead of mystery and suspense, we see and know.
In the original Halloween, after the famous, subjective-view opening murder
of his older sister Judith by the young Michael Myers, the narrative has two foci:
one is Laurie Strode and her high school girlfriends, who are stalked by the adult
Myers after he escapes from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium; the other, Dr. Loomis as he
desperately tries to find his former patient. In the new version, we are given a greatly
expanded back-story, depicting not only ten-year-old Michael’s troubled home life
before the horrific events of October 31, but also his subsequent psychological treatments by Dr. Loomis. Young Michael is also no longer content to simply murder
his older sister. Before killing her, he slays his stepfather and Judith’s boyfriend by
catching them unaware—sparing only his baby sister “Boo”—in addition to having dispatched with a school bully earlier in the day. While in the sanitarium, he
also murders a nurse, bringing his pre-teen body count to five. When Myers finally
escapes from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium after fifteen years’ imprisonment, we follow
him to a truck wash where he murders a trucker and steals his clothes. Only then,
nearly an hour into the movie, does he proceed back home to Haddonfield.
Rather than Myers stalking his prey, the narration in the remake now follows
Myers. Rather than being an entity—a “shape,” as he was called in the end credits of
the original film—Michael is a character. This is the central, defining premise upon
which Zombie stakes his film, and it has both formal and thematic implications for
the narrative.
To the remake’s credit, continuity is created between Michael the deranged
boy and Michael the adult monster in a detailed, systematic way. To cite one specific example: a striking shot from the film’s first half has Michael, distantly framed
between two rows of trees, silently stalking a school bully who beat him up earlier in the day. This view, including the distant framing of the killer, is graphically
duplicated in the second half of the picture as Michael follows Laurie home. To
cite a more general trend: during murder scenes in both halves of the movie, the

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same alternations in shot scale—quickly cutting between disorienting close-ups
and long shots—are deployed to depict the killer in action, and “both” Michaels
are consistently filmed from low angles, giving the impression of him bearing down
on his victims. Achieving this spatial arrangement in the case of young Michael
requires deliberate arrangements of the mise-en-scène, as each of his victims is larger
than he himself is. Both Michael’s stepfather and Judith’s boyfriend are butchered
when they are seated, allowing the adolescent killer to tower above each. The most
striking image of the subsequent scene—during which Michael dons his signature
white mask for the first time—is a distantly framed, low-angled shot of Michael,
knife in hand, slowly walking toward his injured sister as she desperately tries to
crawl away.
While this kind of attention to detail is noteworthy in its own right, it is ultimately in service of the aim of characterizing the murderous Myers—an aim that
proves to be thematically problematic. The concomitant behavioral and representational continuity across the fifteen-year divide reinforces not only Michael’s centrality to the narrative but also his humanity (as it were). In this way, the adult Michael’s
murderous actions are the same as his childhood atrocities, and they (presumably)
stem from the same boyhood trauma.
The extended prologue of the new Halloween is clearly an attempt to offer
something in the way of an explanation for Michael’s rage. Although he has a loving relationship with his stripper mother (who is initially blind to his eccentricities), he has an abusive stepfather, is bullied at school, and tortures animals. Yet
none of this is able to account for Michael’s violent, juvenile dementia. If it were,
Loomis would be able to treat him. But he isn’t, so Michael’s evil is, ultimately,
unexplainable. So why the lengthy, gruesome prologue, if the film is going to retain
the original’s premise about the unintelligibility of evil? Again, the focus is not on
the unknown but the known.
Consider how, in the remake, Loomis is more shaken by what the young
Michael has done—five brutal murders—than what he is. In the original Halloween,
Loomis looked into Michael’s eyes and saw nothing but blackness. In the remake,
Loomis sees the blackness in his patient’s eyes, but ultimately characterizes them
as “the eyes of a psychopath.” As he later tells Sheriff Bracket, Myers is a “soulless
killing machine driven by pure, animal instinct.” The original Halloween does not
explicitly imbue Myers with any supernatural qualities. That would come with
time (and sequels—specifically, the pagan rituals of 1996’s Halloween: The Curse of
Michael Myers). Yet there is something undeniably otherworldly about the Shape,
particularly in regard to the killer’s improbable physical strength. As Todorov notes,
a recurring theme of the fantastic is the existence of beings more powerful than men
(109). An uncertainty as to the source of this power contributes to the hesitation
characteristic of the genre.

Quite unlike the behemoth that he is in the remake, the original Myers is
completely ordinary in stature and build. And yet he displays not only remarkable
resilience but also near-superhuman strength, both of which the viewer is at a loss
to explain. Adding to this ambiguity is the eerie elegance with which Myers carries
out his violent acts. The gracefulness of the Shape’s slow, stalking gait is one of the
original Halloween’s best-known features, but even actions like lifting a hapless teenager off the ground by his throat and pinning him to the wall with a butcher knife
are carried out with a certain methodical fluidity that belies their physicality—and
increases the degree of uncertainty as to the nature of the film’s uncanny event.
In the new Halloween, Michael’s physical size is emphasized in a number of
ways that erase all doubt as to the source of his strength. In the first place, the
character is played by Tyler Mane, a muscular, 6’9” stuntman who towers over every
other actor in the movie. The low-angle framing of Myers detailed above serves not
only to accentuate this size difference but also to characterize it as threatening and
overpowering. His is a looming presence overhead that explodes downward in savage bursts. It is not surprising, then, that the only scene in the movie’s second half
that portrays Myers as halfway vulnerable—his first meeting with Laurie, where he
produces a worn photograph of himself holding his baby sister (a gesture Laurie
fails to understand)—has him drop to his knees and slump to Laurie’s level. Correspondingly, both characters in this scene are framed straight on at eye level.
The question of Myers’s motivation for returning to Haddonfield and seeking
out Laurie Strode is also answered. As the scene described above shows, Michael
returns home in search of his baby sister. That Laurie Strode is actually the younger
sister of Michael Myers is a familiar element of the Halloween storyline. The Shape’s
unrelenting quest to finish off his entire family—first his sister (in the first and second movies), then his niece (4, 5, and 6), and then his sister again (7 and 8)—sets in
motion the narratives for each installment of the “original” series. This plot point is
so enshrined in the series’ mythology that it is easy to forget how this relationship,
and all the thematic implications one can draw out of it, play no part whatsoever in
the original film. It is not until Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal, 1981) that the familial
relationship between victim and killer is (rather clumsily) tacked on, thus retrospectively positing a reason for Michael’s pursuit of Laurie. In the first Halloween,
the Shape’s interest in Laurie—stalking her, isolating her by killing her friends, and
then attacking—is largely unexplained. In an early scene, the Shape observes Laurie
with young Tommy Douglas, and there is a sense that the killer identifies himself
with Tommy, and thus equates Laurie with his murdered older sister. The point
is left open, however. In contrast, Michael’s homecoming in the remake is a perverse expression of a big brother’s love—if we could call it that—for his baby sister.
When she fearfully rejects him, unaware of their relation, Myers’s rage spills over
and he spends the final act of the picture chasing her.

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While Loomis’s ultimate inability to effectively treat Michael is a gesture in
the direction of commentary on the unaccountable nature of evil, the dominant
current of the remake flows unquestionably toward explanation and explication.
The lengthy prologue of Michael’s traumatic childhood shows us the origins of his
iniquity, and the connection between the violent manifestations of his boyhood rage
and his later atrocities is reinforced through formal continuity. Those same formal
strategies are used to accentuate the adult Michael’s already imposing physical size,
erasing all questions as to the nature of his strength and resilience. Finally, further
motivation for Myers’s bloody homecoming is provided by the movie’s adoption of
the original series’ conceit that Laurie is, in fact, the killer’s baby sister. This, in sum,
erases all hesitation that Myers may or may not be a supernatural phenomenon.
Whereas the new Loomis believes he “failed” Michael by not being able to help him,
the original Loomis knew he couldn’t help Michael and dedicated himself to keeping
Myers locked up.
With all of that said, a question remains: to what degree are these features the
product of Zombie’s authorial vision, as opposed to being symptomatic of larger
trends and transformations in the horror film genre, American cinema, or even
American popular culture at large? In order to properly consider this matter, we
need to expand the focus of our inquiry to include an examination of the broader—
and comparable—generic contexts of both the remake and the original Halloween.

Slashers
As much as Carpenter’s Halloween is regarded, rightfully, as an important
work of horror cinema—or cinema in general, really—it is also part of a larger
phenomenon: a cycle of American horror films released in the 1970s and early 1980s
that we now refer to as slashers. Although not without precedent within the horror
genre—Carol Clover has noted affinities between the cycle and Alfred Hitchcock’s
1960 film Psycho (16), while Andrew Tudor describes slashers as a “youth-focused”
variant of a common “terrorizing” horror narrative (198)—the original Halloween,
together with Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), has been held by
most scholarship as one of the two movies that inaugurated the cycle by establishing
its narrative and thematic conventions.1
In general, slasher movies concern teenage protagonists who, while partaking
in a ritualized activity—babysitting, camping, prom night, a road trip—are terrorized by a villain unknown to them, who often goes about murdering the members
of the group in a physical fashion using a variety of physical implements. The main
protagonist of slasher pictures, as detailed most thoroughly by Clover in her seminal book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film, is often a
virtuous (although not necessarily virginal) female.

A likely objection to this description of the cycle is how, by emphasizing aspects
like physicality and materiality, it excludes one extremely popular movie that is frequently included in discussions of the slasher movie: Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on
Elm Street (1984). This is deliberate on my part. Without denying the similarities
between the first Elm Street film and earlier horror movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), I would argue that the picture’s emphasis
on family—both the threat to the collective family unit and conspiratorial efforts
by adults to protect their children from external threats—makes it more akin to
movies like The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) and Craven’s earlier works The Hills
Have Eyes (1977) and Last House on the Left (1972). As Pat Gill has observed, the
imperiled teenagers in slasher pictures have “no hope of help from their parents”
(18). Furthermore, the explicitly supernatural characteristics of A Nightmare on Elm
Street make it both unlike the initial slasher movies and, as I shall detail shortly, part
of a subsequent development in the horror genre.
By chance—or perhaps a more sinister force!—Zombie’s Halloween is also part
of a cycle of horror movies: in this case, a cycle of slasher remakes. Recent years have
brought us new versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Marcus Nispel, 2003),
When a Stranger Calls (Simon West, 2006), and Black Christmas (Glen Morgan,
2006). Looking ahead, a remake of Prom Night (1980) will be released in the spring
of 2008, and updated takes on both My Bloody Valentine (1981) and Friday the 13th
are currently in development.
Here we are presented with an opportunity to pose two further questions:
Are any other movies from the original slasher cycle also examples of Todorov’s
fantastic genre? If so, is the uncanny nature of the new Halloween—with its more
communicative narration and emphasis on overt display—common to other slasher
remakes? A sampling of classic slasher films and their recent remakes sheds light on
this question.

Black Christmas
In Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974) the members of a sorority house are terrorized
over the Christmas holiday by “Billy,” an unseen murderer who alternates between
menacing the coeds with threatening, sexually explicit phone calls and killing them
off, one by one. Although comparatively neglected in scholarship, Black Christmas is
considered by some to be the first slasher film. Interestingly, it anticipates Halloween
in a number of ways. For example, the movie makes extensive use of a mobile camera—here using a wide-angle lens, which creates a distorting effect—accompanied
by heavy breathing to represent the killer’s subjective point of view. What I would
like to highlight, however, is the film’s ending.
After finally determining that the threatening phone calls are “coming from
inside the house!” the police rush to the sorority—but not before Jessica kills her
boyfriend Peter, whom both she and the police believe to be the killer. A distraught

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Jessica is then sedated and left to sleep in the darkened sorority house. Slowly, the
camera tracks away from her room and moves down the hallway, stopping on the
attic door. It opens a crack, and the scene cuts to the interior of the attic, where two
of the killer’s victims remain hidden. “Agnes, it’s me Billy,” comes the lispy voice of
the killer, and as the camera pulls back, the phone inside the house begins to ring.
This conclusion is not unlike that of the original Halloween, where, after shooting Michael six times, Loomis looks over the balcony to the ground below, only to
find that the Shape has vanished. As Todorov notes, endings like these are a common feature of the fantastic, because they restore at a story’s very end the hesitation
between a natural and abnormal explanation for the events described (51). To this I
would add that it is important to distinguish between the endings of Black Christmas and Halloween and the more conventionalized horror conclusion that has the
villain “come back” for one final attack. Such endings are less about sustaining fantastic hesitation than providing, as we shall see in a moment, one final shock or jolt
before the credits roll. Moreover, they usually conclude a narrative in which there is
no uncertainty as to the nature of the uncanny event.
As in the new Halloween, the Black Christmas remake furnishes the psychotic
Billy with an extensive, explanatory back-story. Born with a rare liver condition that
makes his skin yellow, Billy is loathed by his mother from the start. After witnessing
them murder his loving father, young Billy is locked in the attic by his mother and
her lover. He remains there for years and is only visited by his mother on one occasion—an occasion that has him sire his own sister. Eventually, Billy escapes from
the attic, maims his sister cum daughter, kills his mother and stepfather, and makes
Christmas cookies from their flesh before being apprehended by police. Like Myers,
Billy escapes from a mental asylum after fifteen years’ imprisonment, and he and
his inbred daughter proceed to tag-team the helpless sorority sisters now residing
in his house. The movie’s final, final confrontation—after most of the characters are
killed, the sorority house burns down, and the inevitable mix-up in the morgue—
has Billy’s daughter Agnes mounting one final assault on Kelli, the surviving female.
Kelli pulls through, killing Agnes by frying her brain using a defibrillator.
When a Stranger Calls
Released in the wake of Halloween, When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979) provides an alternative example of a film creating fantastic hesitation. The movie is most
famous for its opening sequence, where a babysitter is terrorized by a series of anonymously placed phone calls that are ultimately, as in Black Christmas, revealed to be
coming from inside the house. The babysitter survives the ordeal, but we learn that
the two children sleeping in their upstairs bedroom have been brutally butchered
by a mysterious killer, a man named Curt Duncan. Yet this episode only serves as
the movie’s prologue; the rest of the original When a Stranger Calls follows a private

investigator as he tracks Duncan after—what else?—the psychopath escapes from
a mental institution after years of incarceration. When the investigator, Clifford,
visits the asylum he presses Duncan’s former psychiatrist about why she was unable
to treat the murderer. The psychiatrist looks Clifford in the eye and says, “Do you
want to know how much we really understand of the human mind?”
Although When a Stranger Calls is ultimately an example of fantastic-uncanny,
the introduction of this kind of doubt—that the uncanny event is attributable to
forces beyond our comprehension—nonetheless contributes to a fantastic hesitation. The remake, however, contains no such hesitation, and instead expands the initial scenario of the threatened babysitter to fill its entire running time. Interestingly,
the new When a Stranger Calls does the opposite of Halloween and Black Christmas
by making its villain entirely anonymous. Yet the result is the same: there is no reason to question the uncanny nature of the killer.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
In terms of offering an explanation for its uncanny events, the remake of The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre stakes out a middle ground between the exposition of the
new Black Christmas and the anonymity exemplified by the When a Stranger Calls
remake. Although his bloody butchering of wayward teenagers is facilitated and
encouraged by his deranged backwoods family, Leatherface is not given the kind
of traumatic childhood that shaped compatriots Michael Myers and Billy. Even
so—and in a departure from the original film—the chainsaw-wielding maniac is
depicted as horribly disfigured, hence his fondness for fashioning masks from the
flesh of his victims (the trope of physical deformity being one of the oldest ways of
denoting a character’s evil inner nature).
In what could be seen as an inevitable development given the trend toward
sequels and spin-offs exemplified in the original slasher cycle, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre was followed by a prequel released in 2006. It should come as no
surprise that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning ( Jonathan Liebesman)
furnishes a complete history for Leatherface (or Thomas, his given name), making
him the deformed product of a botched abortion who is rescued and subsequently
adopted by the cannibalistic Hewitt family.
Absent from the remake (and its prequel) are a number of admittedly minor
elements that nevertheless add a degree of ambiguity to the original Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, including an astrological subtext introduced early in the film. In one of the
movie’s first scenes, one of the teenagers, Pam, reads to the others from her American Astrology almanac. Initially, her gloomy prognostications about “Saturn in retrograde” are laughed at by her friends. But after a violent encounter with a hitchhiker,
her reading of Franklin’s horoscope, predicting a “disturbing and unpredictable day,”
elicits no laughter. Pam is then asked to read Sally’s horoscope: “There are moments

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when we cannot believe that what is happening is really true. Pinch yourself and you
may find out that it is.”
As in When a Stranger Calls, the underlying theme that the events in question
are the product of supernatural powers is not developed at any great length, yet the
introduction of such an element has the effect of calling into question the degree to
which the uncanny events that befall the characters can be explained by recourse to
the laws of the natural world.

T h e R e t u r n o f t h e R e t u r n o f t h e R e p r e ss e d
While none of the other original slasher films that have been remade
prove to be examples of the fantastic in the manner of Halloween, each nonetheless introduces elements that contribute to a fantastic hesitation. Mysterious villains, unresolved endings, and subtexts about the limits of rational understanding
add degrees of uncertainty about the nature of a film’s uncanny events, calling into
question whether those events are the product of natural or supernatural forces. In
contrast, the remakes work in a variety of ways to both quantify and qualify their
disquieting phenomena, from positing origins for their villains through explanatory
back-stories to providing conclusive endings. So if fantastic elements are characteristic to some original slasher movies yet not to their remakes, why is this so?
One approach would be to consider larger developments in the horror genre
since the inauguration of the original slasher cycle in the 1970s. As I noted above,
Noël Carroll has addressed the fantastic in his book The Philosophy of Horror or
Paradoxes of the Heart. For Carroll, examples of the fantastic are not horror because,
by his definition, horror requires a patently supernatural element. In the larger
sweep of the genre, this is a perfectly reasonable condition. Yet, in the context of
contemporary horror cinema, it would be overly exclusionary. Indeed, the only contemporary American horror movies of late to feature the paranormal tend to be
remakes of Japanese and Korean films, and even this trend seems to be waning. We
could also note how, in the original slasher cycle, there is a swift move away from
fantastic equivocation—and, perhaps, away from the slasher proper—to either the
uncanny or, more prevalently, the supernatural. Two of the more popular horror
series of the mid- and late 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Clive Barker’s
Hellraiser, feature necromancy and supernatural villains. At the same time, even the
Halloween and Friday the 13th series become increasingly supernatural—helping, in
part, to explain how their respective monsters are able to return time and again. This
tendency toward paranormal villains reverses in the late 1990s, signaled not only by
the success of the Scream franchise (1996, 1997, 2000) and subsequent teen-oriented
horror movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer ( Jim Gillespie, 1997) and

Urban Legend ( Jamie Blanks, 1998) but also by the failure of big-budget supernatural horror pictures like The Haunting ( Jan de Bont, 1999) and House on Haunted Hill
(William Malone, 1999).2
What are the implications of these developments? Horror, like all fiction, favors
certainty over ambiguity—a fact implicit in Todorov’s positing of the fantastic as
but a thin line between bordering genres. This may seem an odd assertion to make
about a genre that is, again, regularly classified and examined on the basis of its elicitation of an affective response in the viewer—specifically, feelings of apprehension
and doubt (two words that are often synonymous with uncertainty). Yet regardless
of whether bizarre and horrific happenings are earthly or otherworldly in nature,
the vast majority of horror films leave no question as to which of those two polarities
is the definite cause of the uncanny event. Many stories and films may flirt with the
fantastic over the course of their narratives, but most ultimately fall to either side of
the median line between the uncanny and the marvelous.
A second, and more interesting, possibility would be to reflect on the ways
in which the original slasher cycle has been thought about, and how this thinking continues to influence those who watch, write about, and even remake those
pictures. The dominant method of examining film genres has traditionally been
to interpret movies as reflections of the American cultural zeitgeist. Westerns represent the eternal struggle between the forces of civilization and wilderness. Film
noir reflects postwar anxiety and a crisis of masculinity. In the case of horror movies, the influence of Robin Wood’s pioneering 1979 essay, “An Introduction to the
American Horror Film,” continues to be strongly felt in scholarship on the genre.
The monster that explicitly threatens the community within a particular horror
picture is a vengeful representation of whatever the dominant ideology deems a
subversive threat to American society—empowered women, communists, teenage
sexuality, terrorists—and it is thus trying to “repress” in order to maintain control
and stability. In this way, critical methodologies drawn, however broadly, from cultural studies and psychoanalysis—what Wood called the “confluence of Marx and
Freud” (195)—continue to be employed. It is not suprising that movies have begun
to regurgitate this theory to the point that the kinds of meanings arrived at through
criticism of the original slasher movies are now explicitly built into their remakes.
Erin, the female hero of the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is in every respect
the prototypical final girl—a virginal, resourceful tomboy with a maternal instinct
who abstains from alcohol and drugs—albeit reverse-engineered from a watereddown version of Clover’s theory. The Freudian overtones in traumatic childhood
back-stories of the new Halloween and Black Christmas are so apparent as to make
the application of any psychoanalytic theory redundant. Nevertheless, one could
certainly anticipate a variety of alternate ways in which a critic might go about reading these films.

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We could note, for example, how the current cycle of slasher remakes is part of
a larger, late-2000s trend of Hollywood “looking back” to 1970s American filmmaking, both in terms of remaking pictures from that era but also setting new films in
the seventies (e.g., Zodiac [David Fincher, 2007], American Gangster [Ridley Scott,
2007]). Many on the political left would no doubt see this hindsight as a reflection
of how the cultural climate of the United States in the early twenty-first century
is akin to the social unrest that the country experienced in the 1970s—that, for
example, Iraq is the new Vietnam. Yet if the kind of fantastic equivocation observed
in the movies of the original slasher cycle—particularly as it relates to the nature
of evil—is taken to be the product of, say, cultural uncertainty, then the complete
absence of this hesitation in the new cycle of slasher remakes undermines any links
between 1970s and 2000s America one could wish to make based on the kinds of
films produced in each decade.
An alternative route would be to read the trend in the new slasher movie
toward attributing violence to social conditions as a repudiation of the idea that
there exists such a thing as “pure” (and unexplainable) evil. This would, however,
prove to be a very well worn path. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue that the
violence in slasher films indicates real-world concerns like “heightened levels of anxiety in the culture, particularly with regard to family, children, political leadership,
and sexuality” (168). Ryan and Kellner are writing about the 1970s and 1980s slasher
cycle, however—so including the original Halloween. In this way, earlier slashers
that leaned toward depicting evil as unexplainable have nevertheless been construed
as reflections of contemporaneous, extra-filmic social conditions and cultural anxieties. Certainly, “family, children, political leadership and sexuality” are just as much
concerns today as they were in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The problem with these attempts to account for the presence of the fantastic
in Carpenter’s Halloween and other original slasher movies is that traditional methods of genre analysis—principally those that read films as reflections of society—
rely on interpretation. Interpretation is, however, at sharp odds with the fantastic.
Indeed, it threatens its very existence. As detailed above, the fantastic depends on a
dual hesitation: by both the characters within the story and by the reader. Yet this
reader is not the one physically holding the book in his hand or sitting in a darkened cinema watching the movie. This reader is instead the one implicit in the text
itself: a reader who Todorov says, “considers the world of the characters as a world
of living persons” (30) and “reacts to events as they occur in the world evoked” (60).
There is no longer a space for the fantastic if events are read allegorically, because
the fantastic requires fiction. Consider: if Michael Myers and other slasher killers are
the product of and powered by repressed psychosexual energy, as per the dominant
psychoanalytic explanation, their superhuman resilience makes sense. After all, psychoanalysis has yet to tire of delineating the myriad ways in which we are all so gosh

darned repressed, which means that the cultural engine that drives the slasher films’
masked maniacs is fed by a bottomless barrel of fuel.
This matter is central to Todorov’s project, which conceives of structure and
meaning as two separate objects, implied by two distinct activities: poetics and
interpretation. He writes, “[To the] poetician what matters is the knowledge of an
object external to him, [while] the critic tends to identify himself with the work,
[and] constitute himself as its subject” (142). It comes as no surprise that Todorov
is critical of the propensity in psychoanalytic criticism to look beyond the text for
meaning. He writes:
When psychoanalysts have been concerned with literary works, they have not
been content to describe them, on any level whatever. Beginning with Freud,
they have always tended to consider literature as one means among others
of penetrating an author’s psyche. Literature is thus reduced to the rank of
simple symptom, and the author constitutes the real object of study. (151)
Given the penchant for interpretation in genre criticism in general and horror
criticism in particular, it is likely that for many nothing short of an all-encompassing psychoanalytic or cultural exegesis of either slasher cycle will suffice. Yet such
explanations rely on extremely broad readings that neglect the formal and thematic
specificities of the films in question. In contrast to an interpretive method that sees
all violent, teen-oriented horror movies as reflections of social anxieties, the poetical approach espoused by Todorov (with its attention to form) enables us to not
only detect important, overlooked developments within the slasher movie but also
provides a productive framework for comparative analysis. Indeed, approaching the
case of the two Halloweens in this manner has led to the recovery of one of the
central, animating aspects of Carpenter’s original: its thoroughgoing uncertainty. In
this way, what Todorov’s model ultimately provides is an indication of how a study
attuned to structure—that is, concerned with describing themes and configurations
rather than naming meanings—has the potential to shed new light on one of the
darker, more blood-splattered corners of the schoolhouse of horror.

N ot e s
1. See, for example, Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern
Horror Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 24, and Andrew Tudor, Monsters
and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 198.
2. An objection one might raise to this trajectory is the release of a number of successful
American ghost movies around the turn of the century, including The Sixth Sense (M. Night
Shyamalan, 1999), What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) and The Others (Alejandro

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Amenábar, 2001). Each of these films is quite unlike those others mentioned—and the vast
majority of horror movies—in that they are targeted at adult rather than teenage demographic,
and also enjoy the concomitant benefit of being easily assimilated into neighboring genres like
“thriller.”

T h e D e at h o f a G e n r e?
Once upon a time, it seemed as if the serial killer genre had come to dominate American popular cinema. The genre’s peculiar amalgamation of Gothic melodrama and horror reached a critical zenith during the 1990s with the immensely
popular and Academy-Award winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which in turn
led to a proliferation of mainstream Hollywood films such as Copycat (1995), Se7en
(1995), and Natural Born Killers (1994). Major Hollywood stars such as Anthony
Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Sigourney Weaver headlined
these productions, which introduced grisly on-screen mayhem to mainstream audiences that otherwise may never have attended a horror film. The popular “stalker”
and “slasher” films of the 1970s and 1980s had been supplanted by the serial-killer
genre. It seemed that the multiple murderer had “arrived” to stake out a lasting and
lucrative place in cinema. By 1992, Su Epstein’s multi-decade survey could catalog
155 different serial killers in film. The sheer ubiquity of these films led scholars such
as Mark Seltzer to proclaim: “Serial murder and its representations . . . have by now
largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of
bodily violence in our culture” (1).
Continuing into the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, serial killer films
have been released on a regular basis. A partial list of these releases includes The
Bone Collector (1999), The Minus Man (1999), Summer of Sam (1999), Cell (2000),
The Watcher (2000), American Psycho (2000), From Hell (2001), Hannibal (2001),
Blood Work (2002), Red Dragon (2002), In the Cut (2003), Monster (2003), Suspect
Zero (2004), Mindhunters (2005), Cry Wolf (2005), Perfume (2006), Scoop (2006),
Disturbia (2007), Mr. Brooks (2007), Zodiac (2007), and Hannibal Rising (2007).
Many prestigious Hollywood names are associated with these productions. Actress
Charlize Theron won the 2003 Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of
serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Kevin Costner took on an uncharacteristically sinister role as the titular lead in Mr. Brooks, wherein his serial-killing character enters
a twelve-step program to break his addiction to serial murder and fights off the
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constant temptation to murder urged upon him by his imaginary alter ego Marshall, played by William Hurt. Other actors, such as Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, Owen Wilson, Keanu Reeves, Johnny Depp, Clint Eastwood, Ralph
Fiennes, Edward Norton, Meg Ryan, Ben Kingsley, Val Kilmer, Jake Gyllenhaal,
and Robert Downey Jr., all starred in films featuring serial murder. A number of
acclaimed directors also took on serial killer projects, among them Spike Lee with
Summer of Sam, Woody Allen with Scoop, and Clint Eastwood with Blood Work.
Director David Fincher, famous for Se7en, returned to the genre with Zodiac, for
the most part a critically well received examination of a journalist’s obsession with
determining the identity of an elusive San Francisco serial killer and what seems
to be, according to Manohla Dargis, “an unexpected repudiation of Mr. Fincher’s
most famous movie, . . . Seven.”
Real-life filmmakers were not the only famous names attached to serial killer
films. The fictional character of Hannibal Lecter, who almost single-handedly
helped launch the genre into prominence, also continued to appear in films in the
new millennium. Producer Dino de Laurentiis, no doubt cursing himself for having
passed on the film rights to The Silence of the Lambs, attempted to make up for a
woeful financial miscalculation by commissioning a remake/prequel (Red Dragon),
a sequel (Hannibal), and a prequel (Hannibal Rising), all based on the foundational
work of Thomas Harris. Of Hannibal, Robert Cettl announced that “the critical and
popular success of [Hannibal] legitimized the serial killer movie. It was no longer
considered the domain of low-budget exploitation . . . Now, ‘serious’ filmmakers,
even auteurs, increasingly used the serial killer film for message and money” (1).
Writing in 2007, Geoffrey Macnab concurred: “Long associated with low-grade
movies and straight-to-video fare, the genre has increasing mainstream appeal.”
Yet in spite of what demonstrably seems to be producers’ enthusiasm for serial
killer films in the first years of the new millennium, popular and certainly critical
taste does not necessarily seem to bear out the industry’s fondness for the genre.
Disappointed by The Watcher, among other films, Sara M. Fetters asks rhetorically:
“is the serial killer genre as we know it dead? . . . Can this genre be revived?” Will
Self goes so far as to claim that the film adaptation of Hannibal “terminates with
extreme prejudice a whole genre, which will, I feel certain, come to be associated
with the last decades of the 20th century, just as surely as Margaret Thatcher or the
compact disc.” As these comments suggest, in the few years since the release of Hannibal, the last serial killer “blockbuster” film in terms of box office revenue, times
have changed.1 Or, put another way, that was then, and this is now. If the serial killer
movie was the new “Western,” as Seltzer claimed, then the serial killer movie also
seems to be fading from the cultural spotlight in much the same way as the Western
did before it. Of the films on the preceding list, some did gross more than their
production costs, such as The Bone Collector, The Cell, Monster, and Disturbia.2 But

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none would qualify as a “blockbuster,” generally acknowledged as a film that grosses
over $100 million. The most recent high-profile serial killer films, Hannibal Rising
and Zodiac, are no exceptions.3 In mainstream Hollywood cinema, the serial killer
story often seems derivative, exhausted, even dated in comparison to the cinematic
emphasis on thinly veiled war allegories and the so-called torture-porn movement
(best exemplified by the Hostel and Saw series) in horror since the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. As is evident in
the commercial disappointments of fare such as Mr. Brooks, Mindhunters, Suspect
Zero, or the aforementioned Hannibal Rising and Zodiac, the mainstream appeal of
serial killer cinema may be on the wane since the “glory days” of the 1980s, 1990s, and
early twenty-first century.
In many ways, the decline of the serial killer in film roughly parallels the disappearance, or at least the retreat from prominence, of the serial killer as the media’s
Public Enemy Number One. During the 1980s, a confluence of high-profile serial
murder cases dominated public attention, especially that of the itinerant Henry Lee
Lucas, whose claims about having killed hundreds of people nationwide were greeted
with little skepticism. According to Philip Jenkins, the federal Justice Department,
concerned with expanding its own role and budgets in the aftermath of the limitations placed upon it during the 1970s, greatly overstated the extent of serial murder.
Jenkins elaborates:
The “federal” view of serial murder asserted that serial murder was a vast
menace, with some four to five thousand related fatalities each year, or up
to a quarter of all American homicides. According to this view, the problem
was novel, without historical precedent, and the threat potential was all the
greater because killers were highly mobile, wandering freely between different
states and jurisdictions. (14)
The popular journalistic and entertainment media, ever quick to capitalize
on new trends, turned to the supposed murder epidemic as a source to generate
audience interest. However, the Justice Department’s sensational interpretations
of the data became increasingly suspect (in part due to Jenkins’s skepticism of the
existence of a “serial killer epidemic”), and serial killers as figures of entertainment
became seriously overexposed, toward the end of the 1990s.
While acknowledging the recent financial downturn of the mainstream releases,
it is doubtless premature to pronounce the death of the serial killer film genre in the
United States. Analysis of the current state of the genre shows it to have transmuted
with the times, eking out a marginal hold in the mainstream commercial marketplace while flourishing in lower-budget “niche” cinema or the straight-to-video
realm. Audiences have become so familiar with these stories that their conventions

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have become part of the cultural landscape, and filmmakers who wish to grab the
attention of the genre-savvy audience must devise scenarios to fit the changing
times. In other words, the genre may have entered into a period of recalibration,
readjustment, and scaling back of expectations to succeed on levels other than vast
box office take. The genre is looking back on its own past, now unavoidably through
the prism of the dissonant post-9/11 global scene, and rewriting the classic narrative
patterns to interrogate and reinvigorate their own assumptions and positions.
A large part of this transformation of the genre, as David Schmid argues, is to
reclaim the serial killer as a reassuringly familiar, even archetypal American antihero
within a cultural context of fear of the Middle Eastern Other (254). In fact, what
is happening is nothing less than a redeeming or humanizing of the serial killer,
in contrast to the mythologizing of the character during what can be considered
the “classical” era of the genre when the archetype was cemented. As evidenced in
this transformation, the formulaic conventions of the genre have proven themselves
adaptable to changing historical conditions, thus allowing critics to make “historical and cultural inferences about the collective fantasies from one cultural period
to another” (Cawelti 7). The serial killer story simultaneously defies containment
within one historical era and bears the signature stamp of the specific cultural context in which it was created.
When viewed in this way, the genre has always been mutable—sensitive to the
cultural changes of modernization. The genre owes its recent identification with
“serial killers” to what Philip Jenkins calls the “media panic” over serial killers during
the 1980s. Certainly, the term “serial killer,” arguably coined by FBI profiler Robert
Ressler during the 1970s, entered the popular lexicon for good at that time. But in
another sense, a film genre built upon a plot framework of sequential murders committed by a psychosexually maladjusted antagonist dates back to Robert Wiene’s
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Surely, a genre that has ridden the mercurial flow
of history and thus gone through many name changes has some life left in it yet.
Even if the recent crop of films has not yielded the financial return expected by
its producers, there seems to be no shortage of new product. Indeed, David Schmid
maintains that “the serial killer industry that existed in the United States before the
attacks [of 9/11] has continued to flourish . . . Indeed, if anything, this industry is
experiencing a boom” (246). One must qualify Schmid’s statement in the light that
many of the cinematic projects in development he cites as supporting evidence for
this claim subsequently went on to achieve less-than-stellar revenues and reviews.
Nevertheless, serial killer movies continue to be made.
Serial killer cinema in the United States has been undergoing a transformation over the past ten years to ensure its continued relevancy in the twenty-first
century. The focus on transcendent, inexplicable evil found in the bulk of the earlier 1990s films gradually shifts to more politically pointed commentary in the late

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1990s, particularly with some critical and social distance from the early-1980s conservative law-and-order ideology that helped construct the serial killer myth in the
first place. The serial killer characters in the process of renegotiating their personal
identities become more clearly emblematic of ideological concerns, or as Steffen
Hantke phrases it, “the problem of identity, which is so closely linked to that of
privacy, can take on national rather than personal proportions” (“The Kingdom”).
Mary Harron’s film American Psycho, for one, moves away from Gothic suspense
altogether and utilizes the serial killer as a nihilistic, satirical character who epitomizes the moral bankruptcy of American consumer culture. Spike Lee’s Summer
of Sam takes another approach to the genre, in which the serial killer figures only
in the background to symbolize the tension of an urban community always on the
verge of an outbreak of violence, in this case a New York Italian-American neighborhood in the 1970s. In what looks for all the world like his earlier film Do the
Right Thing (1989), remade as a serial-killer movie, Lee focuses on marginalized or
“underworld” groups, where the serial killer is only the most extreme manifestation
of a sick society and a pathological sense of alienation among the disenfranchised,
the angry, and the lost. Geoffrey Macnab identifies Lee’s film as following in a tradition established by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film, The Lodger, and concludes: “Ironically, most of the best serial killer movies aren’t about serial killers. They are about
the effect that a killer has on the community.” In this sense, Harron’s and Lee’s films
are dystopic visions of the corruption of American society, reified in the figure of
the serial killer.
However, the genre has reinvented itself in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The genre shows a marked trend toward heightening the degree of sympathetic
bond between audiences and the lethal protagonists depicted on-screen. In many
ways this claim seems counterintuitive. After all, wouldn’t the social fear engendered
by the terrorist attacks increase audience alienation from the serial killer? However,
the claim makes more sense in light of several factors underlying this latest evolution. The first is that federal law enforcement now has a new bogeyman to gin up
widespread public support for expansion of power: the Middle Eastern terrorist.
The serial killer now seems almost quaint in comparison. Another factor may simply be that the genre has been in the public awareness for a long enough period of
time now that any genre’s tendency to interrogate its own conventions has in this
case rewritten the preternaturally cunning serial killers of the classical era into ones
more humanly accessible to the audience. Monsters, which serial killers in mainstream cinema have certainly been coded as, have always elicited audience sympathy through their freakish exceptionalities and pathetic loneliness. Audiences have
always been coaxed through identification strategies to assume the killer’s pointof-view and thus empathize with it. So why should it now be surprising that the
cinematic serial killers are becoming even more humanized and comprehensible?

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The Showtime television drama series Dexter, based loosely on the novels of Jeff
Lindsay, constitutes an apex of sorts for this trend. The series debuted in October
2006. It centers on the character of Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who works for the
Miami Metro police department as a blood-spatter analyst. Having been trained
by his adopted policeman father to fake normal human emotions and channel his
bloodlust, Dexter as an adult confines his killing to other killers. His job provides
him with not only a means to find victims but a socially constructive outlet for his
fascination with blood. He is well liked by most of his colleagues and maintains the
façade of a loving relationship with his girlfriend Rita. The series enjoys critical and
audience approval and has completed its third season as of this writing. When one
considers that the audience is asked to identify and sympathize with a serial killer
to an unprecedented extent, the success of the series is remarkable.
An additional factor may be at play here, one that Elisabeth Bronfen alludes
to when she writes that “our enjoyment of Hollywood cinema is contingent upon
a welcome familiarity with the imaginary geography it produces (its characters, its
stories)” (20). Certainly, the serial killer, with a proven track record for eliciting a
pleasurable frisson in audiences, is one of those familiar characters by this point in
cinema history. One of the reasons for this audience comfort level is that the serial
killer is a shadow manifestation of the American self-image of independence and
innocence. These values have been tested sorely by the traumatic national events of
the past several years. The notable embrace of the serial killer as hero may signify
a nationalistic re-justification of the violence that has always been the shadow of
American independence.
The genre flirtation with serial killer movies with a social conscience did
seem to change in the aftermath of 9/11 and the American invasion of Iraq. As the
nation moves forward into a frightening future haunted by the specters of resource
scarcity, international isolation, environmental deterioration, and what seems like
never-ending war, is it any wonder that a character so quintessentially American is
going to be rehabilitated for film audiences searching for the comfort of the familiar
in the contours of film geography? The result is fiction that, in Isabel Santaularia’s
words, “through the manipulation of fear and a closure that involves a restabilisation of the social order or a defence of the need to fight for its preservation—
ultimately articulates a socially conservative discourse” (66). Edward J. Ingebretsen
makes a related point: “[serial killers] restore a sense of immediacy and intimacy to
relations that had been ‘domesticated’—precisely because they place these under
threat. . . . the existence of the domestic fantasy makes possible a certain organization of social facts and conditions, making them ‘visible’ in ways that subsequently
can be politically useful” (33). To sum up, then, the serial killer in fiction performs
a restorative function for the consuming audience. The filmmakers’ strategies in
facilitating this reconciliation between audience and serial killer are diverse, but
certain patterns do emerge.

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Re w r i t i n g t h e P r o f i l e: F r o m Th e C e l l to Zo d i ac
The duel between an exceptionally dedicated yet marginalized professional
and an even more marginalized serial killer with a baroquely distinctive modus operandi remains a genre constant. The battle between good and evil inherent in such
narratives, especially in a time of escalating international tensions and ubiquitous
political rhetoric about the evil character of one’s enemies, has built-in contemporary relevance. The closure, however temporary, typically provided by film narrative
serves a therapeutic function in such times. The blurred metaphysical lines or moral
ambiguity in serial killer stories, wherein the distinctions between the detective figure and the killer are often elided, do not detract from audience experience of these
films and are, in fact, critical to producing narrative anxiety as a necessary prerequisite for the satisfying closure. Carl D. Malmgren explains this satisfaction:
[Serial killer] fiction puts crime in brackets, giving readers a glimpse into the
psychopathology of a decentered character even as that character is being
neutralized by the procedures of the centered world of the police. Such a
denouement is quite satisfying [. . .] insofar as it reassures us that the [. . .]
forensic science of one world can disarm the unreason of the other. (179)
Of the anxiety inherent in the narratives, Barbara Fister writes that crime fiction is “a genre that deliberately exploits anxiety” by tapping “into topical social concerns using familiar formulas to produce suspenseful narratives” (43). The familiar
serial killer film may also be said to exploit the anxiety of confronting the potential
for evil within the self. Given the dramatic tension inherent in such a dynamic, it
is likely that stories featuring a showdown between a serial killer and an equally
obsessed investigator (often, but not always, a law enforcement agent) will continue
to appear over the long term.
Films containing this dynamic, initiated by the breakthrough profiler film
The Silence of the Lambs, are very much in the style of “gory, Italian-style detective
drama—American giallo” (Worland 112–13). Some of these American giallo films,
much like serial killers emulating the murderous careers of those who have gone
before them, replicate and amplify the already hyper-signified thrills of The Silence
of the Lambs. A film like The Cell is a typical example of “copycatting” of the template
established by Demme’s film, right down to using Lambs composer Howard Shore
to score the film’s music. The template can be summarized like this: the serial killer
serves the narrative as both a pitiful freak and a terrifying threat. He is confronted
by a courageous but vulnerable heroine committed to saving the lives of the innocent. The plot exploits any number of social anxieties, such as the long-term harmful effects of abuse inflicted upon innocent children. But The Cell also rewrites the
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serial killer character even while preserving that legacy of the genre, like an insect
fossilized in amber.
In The Cell, the heroine is gifted therapist Catherine Dean, who is committed to bringing a boy named Edward from a coma. To do so, she utilizes a new
technology that combines psychotropic drugs with virtual reality to link her mind
directly into Edward’s. But at the request of FBI agent Peter Novack, she enters
the mind of comatose serial killer Carl Stargher to find clues as to the location of
an imprisoned woman. The Cell, taking a genre trend to an extreme, literalizes and
visualizes what was only witnessed from the exterior before: the interiority of the
killer’s psychological spaces and the corruptive peril those spaces pose to the intellectual who would seek to enter them to gain information.4 In Stargher’s case, he
dreams of himself in his coma as alternately a powerful Asian king and a fearsome
demon: manifestations of a will to murder that threatens to kill Dean. If The Silence
of the Lambs shows the serial killer’s psyche as painfully uncovered by Clarice Starling and helpfully interpreted by her “it-takes-one-to-know-one” guide Hannibal
Lecter, then The Cell physically places the heroine directly inside the topography of
the killer’s mind, truly a prison “cell” from which escape is difficult. A benign version
of Lecter’s manipulative psychiatrist, Dean brings the terrified little boy who still
inhabits the labyrinth of Stargher’s psyche into her own healing mind. Through
doing so, she ultimately releases him from his earthly prison to find redemption.
Having done so, Dean is now worthy of restoring the other innocent boy, Edward,
to his waking life.
In the plot device of a race against time to save an otherwise doomed victim,
The Cell follows faithfully the template of The Silence of the Lambs. However, The
Cell amplifies a theme barely suggested in the earlier film—that early trauma and
horrific child abuse creates a monstrous adult. As is demanded of a serial killer in
such films, Stargher practices an elaborate if not outright Byzantine murder ritual,
or signature, unique to him. He places kidnapped women in a large glass tank, waits
for a period of time, and then drowns them. Part of the suspense of the film lies
in discovering what trauma in Stargher’s past gave its imprimatur to his bizarre
methodology. As a boy, Stargher nearly drowned while being baptized in a river. He
was abused by a father who beat the boy for breaking plates and playing with dolls.
The young Stargher drowned an injured bird that he loved in order to keep it from
meeting a worse fate at the hands of his cruel father.
Frozen psychosexually in place by this early trauma, the adult Stargher ritually
drowns his victims as he did to the bird, bleaches them white to match the dolls he
played with, and suspends himself from hooks clipped to steel rings in his back to
provide the illusion of weightless rapture evocative of his baptism. Audience sympathy is further reinforced for Stargher by Agent Novack’s stated belief that Stargher
discards bodies in increasingly clumsy ways so as to ensure his eventual capture

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and cessation of the cycle of violence. The little boy still surviving within the adult
Stargher asks Dean to drown him, which she initially refuses to do. But she soon
realizes this is the only method to free him from his coma and the torment of his
adult life. She grants his wish and then grieves for his death. While the “stop me
before I kill again” theme is certainly not new to the genre, it is striking how much it
is emphasized here, a necessary prerequisite for the heightened audience sympathy
for the killer as a suffering being. The Cell does not celebrate the death of the serial
killer, as did The Silence of the Lambs. Rather, the film challenges an audience to
grant absolution to a killer and celebrate his salvation.
The film Zodiac takes a different approach to the story of an investigation into
the crimes of a serial killer. The social anxiety strategically built into this film is the
post-9/11 fear of terrorism, not the 1990s anxiety over ill effects of child abuse and
victimization. Unlike the sympathetic killer of The Cell, the serial killer in Zodiac is
largely off-stage and never conclusively known to the audience. So, the investigation
to unmask the killer’s identity takes center stage. Compared to the hallucinatory,
fast-paced aesthetic of The Cell, Zodiac is deliberately realistic (an exception is the
striking scene where the text of one of the killer’s ciphers is superimposed on the
walls of a newsroom) and almost leisurely paced. The time frame of the story is
greatly expanded by covering a span of many years, from the late 1960s to the early
1980s. The running time (158 minutes) of the film favors methodical scene development and extended dialogue, so there is little artificially hyped sense of urgency.
Rather, the countless details and time-consuming false or inconclusive trails of any
lengthy investigation of an unsolved case are here on display.
Zodiac is a cerebral exercise in the methodology of solving a puzzle, or, as Amy
Taubin says, “[It] is less a film about characters than about process—the process of
mining and arranging information in search of the truth” (25). Those expecting a
cathartic confrontation between investigator and serial killer will not get one, except
for a brief staredown at the film’s end. Director David Fincher constructs the antithesis of the typical film centered on a serial killer investigation. In Taubin’s words, the
film is “shaped to foil narrative expectations” (25). Fincher resists the temptation to
replicate the adrenalin highs of his earlier success, Se7en. He is not only rewriting
the genre to make his story fresh, he is attempting to deconstruct the genre that
Se7en helped cement. The familiar genre touchstones are here for the genre-savvy
audience to embrace, but they are presented in a realistic fashion.
One of the most recognizable touchstones is the dedicated, even obsessive
investigator who has made it his life’s work to pursue a serial killer. Zodiac primarily
hinges upon the character of Robert Graysmith, a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist
and self-proclaimed amateur sleuth who commits to a quest, at great personal and
professional risk, to uncover the identity of northern California’s mysterious Zodiac
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in cipher and purportedly written by the killer, are mailed to the newspaper editorial staff. Graysmith takes it upon himself to begin obsessively working leads on
the case. He strikes up an unlikely alliance with a Chronicle reporter, Paul Avery, to
share theories and information about the case. Avery’s function in the narrative is to
represent everything that Graysmith is not: a flashy, arrogant, debauched, and privileged member of the journalistic inner circle, in contrast to Graysmith’s straightarrow outsider. Yet Avery quickly self-destructs and suffers exile under the stress
of the investigation. He ultimately loses his job at the respected newspaper and
descends into the professional nadir of writing for the tabloids—perhaps an inevitable end, given the legitimate newspaper world’s fascination with the lurid details
of the Zodiac case.
The failure of the journalistic investigatory apparatus now evident, it is left to
outsider Graysmith to carry on the investigation on his own time in the film’s second
half. His amateur sleuthing parallels the officially sanctioned city police investigation spearheaded by Chief Inspector Dave Toschi. It does not take much genre savvy
to know which investigation will ultimately unmask Zodiac. Graysmith’s extralegal
status allows him to take shortcuts that Toschi never could, so it is Graysmith who
eventually puts it all together, with Toschi as a reluctantly admiring audience of
one, to reveal the likely identity of Zodiac. Yet precisely because Toschi has no hard
evidence, Zodiac remains officially unidentified and the narrative finally frustrates
audience desire for the traditional closure of the “detective versus serial killer” story.
Fincher destabilizes the climactic “unmasking” even more by noting in the end title
cards that the DNA of Graysmith’s favorite suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, did not
match the DNA on file for the Zodiac killer. Through this kind of evocation of the
ambiguity of real life, the film situates itself within the realistic tradition.
One of the social anxieties most dramatized in Zodiac’s use of the serial killer
template is that of family values in conflict with professionalism. In the span of years
that the film covers, Graysmith is initially single but then marries and becomes a
family man. However, he continuously neglects wife and children in fevered pursuit of the shadowy, taunting killer. Of Graysmith’s single-mindedness, Manohla
Dargis writes: “Domestic tranquility, it seems, can’t hold a candle to work, to the
fanatical pursuit of meaning and self discovery.” Ryan Gilbey concurs: “Cinema
commonly applauds single-mindedness in its heroes, but Zodiac shows the cost of
it, too” (45). The threat Graysmith poses to his own family’s unity is bad enough,
but when it becomes publicly known that Graysmith is working on a book about
the murders, he begins to receive frightening anonymous calls at his home. This
double threat to the sanctity of family, aided and abetted by the detective’s own
obsession, is well known to any regular viewer of the serial killer genre. What is different this time is Fincher’s restrained, realistic approach to the story of a journalist
covering a crime story. The film is very much in the style of Alan J. Pakula’s All The

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President’s Men (1976). Like Woodward and Bernstein, Graysmith’s persistence is
rewarded with completion of his book. He achieves certain knowledge of Zodiac’s
identity, a discovery that not even Toschi, hampered by the limitations of his official role, could uncover.
The vulnerability of family is not the only social phobia that Zodiac exploits.
There is much here in the film to resonate with anxiety-ridden audiences in the
post-9/11 era. The faceless Zodiac killer traumatizes the entire region of northern California, striking safely at random victims from anonymity. His crimes are
unthinkably brutal, such as when he stabs repeatedly two bound and helpless young
lovers by the side of an idyllic lake. He co-opts the media as an unwitting accomplice
in terrorizing citizens by sending the Chronicle chilling and taunting messages he
knows will be broadcast far and wide to audiences that would have never otherwise heard from him (evoking memories of the periodic messages from Osama bin
Laden delivered to the Western media, or the by-now-almost-forgotten and still
unsolved “anthrax” letters of 2001). He proves frustratingly elusive, such as the time
when police see him fleeing the scene of the cabdriver’s murder but nevertheless
escaping because of a flawed suspect description. Even when Graysmith begins to
narrow in on the individual whom he believes to be the killer, the suspect remains
largely inaccessible and unknown to society at large. To an audience accustomed
to a sense of a continuing siege mentality since 2001 and frustrated by the national
inability to capture the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, the Zodiac killer of the
1960s and 1970s is perceived as much as terrorist as he is serial killer. The inability
of the police as agents of the American state are as helpless to prevent and solve
the crimes as the U.S. Government was to prevent 9/11. But the film is ultimately
consoling because Graysmith, as a hard-working individualist in the tradition of the
American national archetype, succeeds in solving (or apparently solving) a mystery
that the marshaled resources of the state apparatus cannot solve.

T h e J o u r n e y o f t h e H e r o i n t h e F i l ms o f T h o ma s H a r r i s
The adaptations of Thomas Harris’s prequels and sequels—for example,
Hannibal, Red Dragon, and Hannibal Rising—constitute another distinct movement
in the evolution of the genre: the completion of the transformation of the serial
killer from feared object of evil to hero and subject of sympathy. The films continue
the narrative arc of turning a cannibalistic serial killer from a caged supporting character into central protagonist and romantic hero who serves as the narrative’s dual
object of identification and desire.
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal establishes Hannibal Lecter as an audience-friendly,
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Clarice Starling. The film plays with the dark promise implied in The Silence of the
Lambs by bringing Starling and Lecter together in a transcontinental courtship
(although not taking it as far as Thomas Harris’s source novel). Lecter proves himself worthy of love in the finest tradition of courtly romance. For years, he pines
for Starling in his exile in Florence, establishing the lovesickness essential to such
a hero. He demonstrates his willingness to risk his own liberty and life by sending
Starling a note of cheer when her career is jeopardized by a botched police raid and
the antagonism of her professional nemesis, Paul Krendler. As a devoted romantic
hero should, he not only braves but defeats every obstacle thrown his way by the
extralegal conspiracy set in motion by the villainous Inspector Pazzi and Mason
Verger. He travels across the ocean to reunite with Starling. Aided by his lady fair in
a critical moment of great peril, he escapes the wild beasts (specially trained maneating swine) of a sacrificial arena and carries the wounded, swooning Starling in his
arms in an iconic image of patriarchal romantic dominance.
His courtship culminates in a surreal romantic dinner in which he dissects the
brain of the still-living Paul Krendler, thus eliminating Starling’s prime enemy. He
indirectly expresses his love for Starling by asking her: “Would you ever say to me,
‘Stop. If you love me, stop’?” She replies, “Not in a thousand years.” Lecter responds
to the rebuff with obvious affection for her integrity: “‘Not in a thousand years.’
That’s my girl.” He is ever the spurned potential lover, suffering for his love but
unwilling to relinquish it.5 Rejected by Starling, he nevertheless proves the depth
of his love for her by sacrificing his hand (or at least part of it) to Starling rather
than hurt her when she handcuffs him to detain him for the imminent arrival of
law enforcement. The audience is coerced by the net effect of all these textual elements to applaud Lecter’s escape at the film’s climax—an escape by boat which
Starling is now in the power position to stop but, perhaps swayed by some involuntary feeling for him, does not. Lecter is borne away over the waters, Arthur-like,
to his wounded exile in a far-off exotic land (in this case, somewhere in Asia). He
is doubly wounded, both in body and heart. But like King Arthur and as the film’s
last image of his signature wink promises, he will doubtless return someday. The
film paints a portrait of the serial killer as a gallant, even chivalrous protagonist
whom the audience wants to see rewarded for his romantic ardor, even if he does
not ultimately win “his” girl.
Perhaps the most narratologically forced instance of the trend to valorize
Lecter is found in Brett Ratner’s remake, Red Dragon, in which the role of Lecter is
noticeably expanded and spotlighted as much as possible within the constraints of a
source novel where an imprisoned Lecter occupies an even more marginal position
than he does in The Silence of the Lambs. The mixed critical and public reaction to
the film Red Dragon seemed to, in some way, capture the mood and tone of a culture
ever so slightly turning away from its attraction to mainstream serial killer cinema.

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Complicating matters, Dino de Laurentiis, the producer of Ratner’s film, also produced the novel’s first adaptation, Manhunter (1986). The original performed financially poorly at the time but has since gone on to garner a highly devoted public
and critical following. The remake quickly polarized fans of the original production
and those who wanted to see a more faithful adaptation of the source novel. Brett
Ratner defended his film in USA Today by first commenting on the poor financial
performance of Manhunter: “Nobody saw the movie . . . It was at the box office
for, like, one weekend” (qtd. in 4D). He then addressed the aesthetic differences
between the two films: “[Manhunter] stays in the Miami Vice ’80s thing . . . It’s very
stylized. I made Red Dragon to be more of a timeless movie” (qtd. in Bowles 4D).
Tom Noonan, the first actor to play serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, offers a contrarian view of the remake: “It doesn’t feel great that they’re remaking it . . . But I’ve quit
being surprised by the greed of Hollywood” (qtd. in Bowles 4D).
Undoubtedly commercial calculations did support the decision to proceed with
the remake. A related factor behind that decision is the opportunity for Anthony
Hopkins to reprise his signature Lecter role one more time. For this purpose to
work, however, the screenplay must invent more scenes for Lecter than originally
existed in the novel. Consequently, the film moves unevenly between the story of
serial killer Francis Dolarhyde’s lethal search for romantic love (which serves as one
of two primary narrative foci in the novel) and that of the psychological and verbal
sparring between profiler Will Graham and Lecter.
This expansion of screen time for Lecter is evident in the film’s opening scenes.
Dramatizing and revising scenes only briefly alluded to in the source novel, the opening establishes a late-night collaboration between FBI profiler Will Graham and
Baltimore psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, whom no one as yet suspects of being the
very serial killer (“the Chesapeake Ripper”) that Graham is stalking. When Graham
realizes the truth, a fight ensues in which Graham is seriously injured and Lecter is
shot and apparently dies, his eyes glazed and wide open. He is next seen laid out on
a slab as if for burial in a basement dungeon, a setting familiar to the audience as the
cell he occupies in The Silence of the Lambs. But he resurrects to speak to Graham.
Lecter appears in the film in several more scenes, during which he offers Graham in
drips and drabs a profile of the “Tooth Fairy” killer, primarily to continue to inflict
psychological harm upon the investigator Lecter nearly killed. Through coded correspondence with Dolarhyde, Lecter even provides the killer with Graham’s home
address so that Dolarhyde may then target Graham’s family at the film’s climax.
The cumulative effect of all these scenes, both within the context of the film and
the audience’s presumed extra-textual knowledge of the other Lecter films, is that
Lecter has risen from the dead to exert superhuman influence upon events even
from the limbo of his confinement. If one considers the trilogy of films united by
the commonality of Hopkins as Lecter, it is in Red Dragon that Lecter achieves his

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apotheosis as a character and manipulates events from a privileged zone set far apart
from the society of men and women.
Noticeably missing is the sexual and romantic tension between Starling and
Lecter, so the film must content itself with the heavy burden of any prequel in doggedly establishing the earlier manifestations of storylines and character behaviors
and predilections already known to the audience. Therefore, Red Dragon spends
much screen time establishing Lecter’s unique culinary predilections, his sly verbal manipulation, his reptilian tics and mannerisms, and his brutality masked by
a façade of Old World courtesy—all of which have already been on display in The
Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, deployed in the service of a Gothic flirtation
with Starling. With Will Graham as a foil to Lecter instead of Starling, it is tempting to conclude that audiences must have been disappointed. Certainly the film’s
below-expected box office take (a tad shy of $93 million and short of the anticipated
blockbuster revenues) provides an indirect measure of that possible disappointment. Recognizing its own structural deficit, the film concludes with a scene that
provides a direct bridge to The Silence of the Lambs, wherein the ever-annoying Dr.
Chilton announces to Lecter in his cell that a woman far too pretty to be an FBI
agent is there to see him. The scene is too little too late for those who miss Starling.
So Red Dragon as a story-of-origins ultimately frustrates those who wish to see how
the murderous romantic hero came to be Starling’s demon lover. Lecter as a remote,
godlike being directing the fall of every sparrow just does not satisfy without his
foil, Clarice Starling.
Going back to the beginning of the Hannibal Lecter story is the etiological narrative conceit of Hannibal Rising, a film which again may have suffered financially
for a structure that does not allow for the presence of Clarice Starling and instead
offers a sexually charged but chaste relationship with Lecter’s Japanese aunt-bymarriage. That aside, the transmogrification of Lecter from villain to protagonist
is completed in this film, or as Kim Newman writes, “There’s no longer even a pretence that Lecter is anything but a hero” (64). The extreme suffering of the youth
is offered by way of mitigation for the excessive crimes of the older man on display
in The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Hannibal Rising is exculpatory in intent,
in much the same way as the Star Wars prequels humanize Darth Vader. The story
provides a context for understanding the seemingly incomprehensible brutality of
the mythic, older Lecter. By situating Lecter’s childhood and formerly indistinct
nationality within a precise historical time and place (Lithuania during World War
II), the film accounts for the otherwise inexplicable Old World manner and speech
of Lecter in the other film installments.
But more than that, the World War II setting allows the film to explain to an
audience just how Lecter became a murderous cannibal. The intent is doubtless
to compel the audience to sympathize with Lecter, an otherwise incomprehensible

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icon of evil, as the product of his environment. Additionally, within the larger cultural context of the Iraq war, the film subtly suggests that wartime cruelty inflicted
on civilians by a powerful aggressor nation carries with it a heavy karmic debt that
survivors of the carnage may come back to inflict upon the author of the destruction. Given the divided American response to the war at the time of the film’s release,
such a textual reading would not necessarily be off-putting to a large segment of the
viewing audience.
A sketchy outline of the formative traumatic events in Lecter’s life was given
in Thomas Harris’s novel Hannibal but did not make it into that film. However, in
the film Hannibal Rising, the story reappears and is expanded. This prequel argues
essentially that Lecter, however monstrous his actions are, is human, and that there
is some degree of causality between childhood trauma and adult pathology.6 This
humanizing project is nevertheless overlaid upon a mythological structure similar
to what Joseph Campbell popularized in his discussions of the hero’s quest in The
Hero with a Thousand Faces. Lecter’s starting point on his journey is his privileged
childhood in Lithuania. However, he is soon orphaned by the intrusion of Hitler’s armies upon his idyllic rural estate. This abrupt and savage expulsion from the
domestic sphere begins the nightmare story of Lecter’s lifelong exile from human
society. With his younger sister Mischa, he is held captive in the Lecter country
hunting lodge by a renegade band of local soldiers, led by a despicable fellow named
Vladis Grotas (the villain of the story). The starving soldiers eventually slaughter
and eat Mischa. Lecter barely escapes this early descent into a personal hell, but
retains no conscious memory of what happened to his sister. The remainder of the
story, and the hero’s quest, hinges upon his journey to recover this memory and,
once recovered, act upon it.
Raised in a Russian orphanage during the Stalin era and suffering from terrible
nightmares, he leaves on his own from the orphanage and finds his way to the home
of Lady Murasaki, his Japanese aunt in France. Murasaki tutors him in the attitudes
and combat styles of martial arts, thus helping set the stage for his future highly
stylized murders. His deep reservoir of rage is soon directed at those who commit
acts of rudeness, especially those against important women in his life. His first, initiatory murder is that of the obese and vulgar Paul the butcher, who makes the fatal
mistake of insulting Lady Murasaki. Following this murder, Lecter is dogged by his
shadow double, a French detective named Popil, who is also a survivor of wartime
atrocities. In his officially sanctioned capacity, Popil brings war criminals to justice,
a laudable project that Lecter will soon, in his own inimitable extralegal way, parallel. The similarities between the two men further predispose the audience to accept
Lecter as a hero questing to redress a grievous wrong.
As further befits a culture hero, Lecter travels to the underworld, in this case the
subterranean recesses of his own mind, to seek revelations necessary for completion

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of his journey. After witnessing a condemned criminal’s reaction to sodium pentathol, Lecter decides to inject himself with the drug to access his repressed memories of what happened to his sister. By so doing, Lecter returns to the most traumatic event of his life—thus a metaphoric descent into hell. In this drug-induced,
visionary state of mind, Lecter remembers what happened to his sister and brings
the knowledge back to his conscious life. So armed, he returns to Lithuania to systematically track down the killers of his sister. One by one, he eliminates his former
tormentors and eats portions of them in a dispensing of poetic justice worthy of
Dante Alighieri.
The film’s climactic confrontation, of course, is with Grotas, whose villainy as a
human trafficker competes with that of grotesquely scarred child-molester Mason
Verger in the audience’s collective memory of the Lecter films. It is interesting that
within the context of these films, the exploitative evil of Grotas and Verger makes
Lecter’s brand of evil noble or at least just in comparison. Lecter’s victory over Grotas frees him to travel to Canada and the New World, in a parody of the journey of
European immigrants, to claim the life of the last of the soldiers who ate his sister.
The film concludes with the iconic image of a diabolically smiling Lecter winking
at the camera, positioned from the point of view of the next victim and, by extension, the audience. This familiar mocking gesture links the young Lecter to the old
and invites the audience to be consumed by this elegant monster from a foreign,
war-torn land. Because Lecter is so familiar, even beloved, the masochistic audience
welcomes the invitation.

T h e B i o p i c s: F r o m M o n s t e r S t r a i g h t to V i d e o
Another genre movement has been to dramatize the lives of some of the notorious
real-life murderers that complemented and reinforced the rise of the serial killer
movie in the first place—Ted Bundy, Aileen Wuornos, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein,
Albert DeSalvo, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gacy—to produce what may be
called the serial killer “biopic.” These films are returning to the source, as it were,
for the serial killer screen narrative. It is a move, of course, that replicates the origin of the genre in the first place in drawing so much on real-life cases for creative
inspiration.7 But the move also provides support for Annalee Newitz’s thesis that
“serial killer stories are preoccupied with realism” and “originate in literary naturalism.” Newitz elaborates: “many of these stories are based in fact or have a pseudodocumentary feel to them [. . .] the realist’s urge to get at some kind of social truth
haunts every story in the pantheon of serial killer tales” (15). At the same time, she
concludes, the serial killer tale also often disavows its social concerns through the
signature narrative insistence that in death is truth. The finality and mystery of

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death thus frequently trumps any social agenda that may be stated or implied by
the narrative events.
Undoubtedly the most preeminent of these pseudo-documentaries or biopics
is Patty Jenkins’s Monster, based on the life of convicted Florida murderer Aileen
Wuornos and starring a nearly unrecognizable Charlize Theron in an Oscar-winning
performance. However, many less well-known films, such as Ed Gein (2000), Ted
Bundy (2002), Dahmer (2002), Nightstalker (2002), Gacy (2003), Green River Killer
(2005), Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murderers (2005), Boston Strangler (2006),
Albert Fish (2007), and Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plainfield (2007), fuse factual biography of notorious killers and horror convention to revisit the territory of the serial
killer biopic as established by earlier genre works such as the well-known Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) or a more obscure entry such as Dahmer: The Secret
Life (1993). The majority of these films (with the notable exception of Monster) were
made on low budgets, cast with relatively unknown actors, and released directly to
video—an acknowledgment on the part of the producers that these biopics typically serve a narrowly defined market niche and do not constitute viable theatrical
releases, let alone blockbusters.8 Given the recent record of the mainstream serial
killer films, the biopic producers may be making the smartest economic bet of all.
While not one of the “founding” members of America’s most recognizable class
of serial killers, Aileen Wuornos is nevertheless significant in that the media of the
early 1990s was quick to brand her as the “first female serial killer.” What is typically
meant by this label is that Wuornos’s murders were popularly believed to be sexually motivated in the same way as those committed by males. Wuornos, a prostitute,
was arrested in 1991 and convicted in 1992 for the murders of seven men across
central Florida. At her trial, she defended her actions as justified self-defense against
“johns” who had turned violent on her. The courtroom jury (as well as the social
jury represented by the media) discounted her claims and condemned her to death.
The vehemence with which American society initially judged Wuornos is explained
by Miriam Basilio: “The use of Wuornos to redefine the category of criminal deviance known as the serial killer to include women occurs at a time when women’s
greater social mobility is causing anxiety in conservative sectors of American society.” Wuornos, a lesbian prostitute with no fixed address and a self-confessed record
of murderous violence, tapped into these sectors’ greatest fears. For all of these sins,
she was first demonized and then punished.
Hence, the title of Jenkins’s film: Monster. If media representations tended to
deny Wuornos her humanity, Jenkins’s film invokes that distancing strategy through
the title and then reverses it with a plot that ostensibly humanizes Wuornos and creates sympathy for her hopeless, tragic quest for fame, power, wealth, and love. Rather
than becoming President of the United States, as she fantasizes about, she becomes
a media “monster” and “the first female serial killer,” an arguable assertion in light

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of the numerous documented cases of females who commit multiple murders over
time.9 Rather than securing steady white-collar employment, she can obtain money
only through selling sexual favors to men that she despises and will eventually turn
her rage against. Rather than finding her soulmate, she suffers betrayal when her
female lover, Selby, testifies against her at her trial. All she aspires to is domesticity and love and acceptance, but what she achieves is social exile and notoriety followed by death. The catalog of woes suffered by Wuornos leads Thomas Doherty
to place the film within the woman’s melodrama genre (4). From this perspective,
then, Monster attempts to forge audience emotional connection to Wuornos and
de-mystify the “monster” label. The serial-killer-as-protagonist trend is definitely
embodied in the film.
However, Monster also disavows its protagonist by rendering her lesbian love
story the site of uncanny horror for the audience. The developing relationship
between Wuornos and Selby takes place within the context of escalating violence
targeted against men. The juxtaposition readily lends itself to audience identification of lesbianism as a source of warped sexuality leading to murder. Terri Ginsberg
labels the film as repressive, even fascist, in its effect. She argues that, in the storyline,
“‘queer’ and ‘perversion’ are the same.” Perversion in this context not only refers to
lesbian sexuality but the perversion of the natural order of victimology, in which a
female prostitute from a social class frequently brutalized by men turns the tables
and kills males. Witnessing such “unnatural” acts may produce alternating levels of
voyeuristic titillation and anxiety within a mainstream audience—impulses that
must be denied and exorcised through Wuornos’s ritual trial and condemnation at
the end of the film. The serial killer biopics tend to conclude with similar expurgations of the serial killer main character, perhaps so that the audience may walk away
without anxiety and residual guilt from sampling the menu of atrocities on display
for most of the running time of the typical biopic.
These biographical films cover the spectrum of America’s most recognizable
serial killers. Often using only the killers’ names as title is an indicator that the
filmmakers have every confidence there is enough name recognition for each serial
killer to ensure an audience within the niche defined by the straight-to-video distribution model. Ed Gein in particular is significant in that his crimes, quite modest by today’s standards of serial-killer crimes, influenced an entire generation of
earlier American writers to mythologize him and his then-unimaginable deeds in
a variety of fictional narratives that resonate within the culture even today. Thus, a
cinema-literate culture may not know exactly who Gein was, but they do know well
the films—Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—based
in part on his actions and may be expected to respond to another film marketed
as the story of the “true life” Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill or Leatherface. Though
not an inspiration for fiction in the same way as Gein, Ted Bundy is remembered

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in extensive true-crime literature and media reportage as a mythic sexual predator,
hiding behind a pleasant mask of heterosexual normalcy that allowed him to rape,
beat, kill, and/or dismember scores of women for years over a huge geographical
range. Then there is Jeffrey Dahmer, one of the most recognizable names coming
out of the 1990s, immortalized in the mass media as a “real-life” Hannibal Lecter.
Dahmer constitutes the closeted, homosexual mirror image of the roving heterosexual Bundy—a trap-door spider as opposed to a wolf.
The cinematic hagiographies focused on these killers are a gloss on the high
(or low) points of their lives, as well as creative interpretations of what motivated
the killers and what metaphysical and/or cultural implications may be drawn from
study of their actions. In terms of genre, the films occupy an ambiguous positioning
somewhere between art and exploitation, with only Monster largely escaping the
“exploitation” charge by virtue of the illustrious names associated with its production.10 One need only compare the generally favorable critical response to Monster
to the derisive reviews for films like Ted Bundy or Ed Gein. For example, critic Mike
D’Angelo, in reviewing Ted Bundy, calls that biopic an “amalgam of trash and pretension” that “fits snugly within a burgeoning genre some call ‘artsploitation.’” Jeffrey
Sconce’s coining of the term “paracinema,” and Joan Hawkins’s elaboration upon
it, is also applicable here, in that both critics discuss genres outside of the mainstream that rely on extreme affect (arousal or revulsion) over intellect. Because of
the emphasis on body over mind, such films are typically dismissed by critics who
would otherwise champion the pushing of conventional boundaries in art. Like pornography and gory slasher films, one is on reasonably safe ground in grouping the
serial killer biopics under the rubric of “paracinema.”
The realist aesthetics of the serial killer biopics differ significantly from their
more expressionistic genre cousins. The biopic aesthetic tends to visualize the story
with a minimum of flourish and a decided lack of brand-name stars (except for
Charlize Theron) whose celebrity might otherwise distract the audience. There are
few shots that call attention to their artifice, although again Monster through its
technical virtuosity manages to escape the “paracinema” label for the critics. A good
example of a shot that calls attention to itself in Monster is the dizzying 360-degree
camera shot that captures the breathlessness of Lee and Selby’s roller-rink date in
Monster. Overall, however, the studied lack of pretension becomes the films’ biggest pretension. The editing pace is generally methodical, even languid—very much
a reaction against the expressionistic, shock-cut, rapid-fire, blurred, asynchronous,
or otherwise fractured sequences in mainstream serial-killer thrillers (such as The
Cell) that have come to signify the monstrous point of view of the outwardly nonmonstrous killer, a point made by Steffen Hantke (“Monstrosity Without a Body”).
There is little of the repetitious, pseudo-sexual buildup and release of suspense so
much a staple of mainstream thrillers. The aesthetic result is pseudo-documentary

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in its denial of the conventional methods used to manipulate the audiences of thrillers. The serial killer biopics are subversive of the slick and expensive stylistics of
conventional Hollywood product, while still indulging in the escalating portrayal of
violence typical of “psycho” cinema both high and low budget.
The serial killer biopics occupy an ambiguous niche between “true crime” narratives and works of fiction. Two of these films, Ed Gein and Bundy, purport to tell
the true story of each killer through brief but authentic video footage and still photographs intercut with extended dramatizations in a style that manages to be both
deliberately artificial and doggedly realistic at the same time. The newspaper and
photographic records of crime scenes and legal proceedings provide the films with
a frame of reality, while the dramatizations of villainy crafted around actors who
physically resemble the killers lead the voyeuristic audience into the otherwise inaccessible details of the killers’ lives and crimes only hinted at it in the official documents. The two films also stick closely to the known facts of the cases, changing
only victims’ names. Any speculative scenes, flashbacks, or dialogue are quite logical
extrapolations from those known facts. The film Dahmer eschews the archival material in favor of a more fictionalized and less factually bound approach to the title
character, while still retaining overall fidelity to some of the well-known highlights
of Dahmer’s criminal career. The films in aggregate convey the now-clichéd banality
of evil through recreations of the killers’ mundane daily lives juxtaposed with the
most heinous moments of their criminal careers. It could even be argued that the
films themselves are banal in structure, theme, and execution and thus come by the
aesthetic and affective effect honestly.
The overall genre trend, then, has been toward a solid domestication of the
serial killer. The spectacular mainstream success of the genre in the last years of the
twentieth century, accelerated into hyper drive with the complicity of law enforcement agencies with a vested interest in promulgating the myth of the serial killer,
has now so entrenched it in the culture that the latest narratives are engaged in a
project of revisiting, interrogating, revising, and reinventing the endlessly permeable
genre. The fictional serial killers are as familiar and welcomed in the current climate
as an old friend, perhaps fallen on hard times but still beloved. It is likely, then, that
audiences will continue to see more of the serial killers at the local cineplexes. The
killers’ eyes will no doubt continue to glare malevolently at consumers from the covers of DVDs in the Best Buy stores.

2. The Bone Collector’s budget was $48 million and box office gross $66,488,090; The Cell’s
budget was $35 million and box office gross $61,280,963; Monster’s budget was $5 million and box
office gross $34,469,210; Disturbia’s budget was $20 million and box office gross $80,106,701 (The
Numbers).
3. Hannibal Rising earned $27,669,725; Zodiac, $33,080,084 (The Numbers).
4. Films like Bruce A. Evans’s Mr. Brooks and James Mangold’s Identity (2003) take a slightly
different but no less extreme approach in that they project the interior space of the psycho killer
out into the exterior world in the form of murderous alter egos, which both the killer and the
audience can see and hear.
5. It must be noted that in Thomas Harris’s source novel, Lecter and Starling do dine
together on Paul Krendler’s brain, become lovers, and abscond together as fugitives to South
America. Lecter accomplishes this feat of corrupting Starling first by isolating her and then
brainwashing her into compliance with his wishes through powerful drugs and hypnotic
suggestions. The filmmakers rejected Harris’s ending as too alienating for the audience, and
instead chose to portray Lecter as a rejected lover.
6. Of course, longtime readers of Harris’s source fiction should not be surprised by this
theme. The film adaptations have tended to minimize or eliminate altogether the narrative
importance in Harris’s fiction of early trauma in the creation of criminals. For Harris, serial
killers are fossilized in psychological place by the formative events of their early youth—angry
children in dangerous adult bodies and possessed of adult strength and cunning.
7. Philip Jenkins, one of the pioneering critics of the cultural construction of serial murder,
comments upon this type of cross-fertilization between fact and fiction: “As we see the constant
creation and recycling of media accounts, the proliferation of texts and images, . . . it is difficult
not to describe this process as compulsive, irresistible, obsessive, lacking any natural ending”
(“Catch Me,” 15).
8. According to Jon Silver and Frank Alpert: “Each year, fewer than half of the total films
produced even receive a theatrical release; most go straight to video or are made for TV”; “Digital
Dawn: A Revolution in Movie Distribution?” Business Horizons 46.5 (September–October
2003): 57–66.
9. See Michael Newton’s Bad Girls Do It: An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers (Port
Townsend, Wash.: Loopanics, 1993).
10. Interestingly, Leslie Felperin takes Monster to task for being too polished or glossy: “. . . in
its own movie terms, there’s something bogus about Monster. Like its swaggering star, hips out
and thumbs hooked in her belt loops, the film walked the indie-movie walk with its impeccably
gritty mise en scene . . . But . . . Monster’s script is clean-edged and fussily neat . . . [Wuornos’s]
voiceover . . . sounds airlessly literary and knowing”; Felperin, “Monster (rev.),” Sight and Sound
14.4 (April 2004): 59.

P e n d u lum S w i n gs: T h e R e t u r n o f “Q u i e t H o r r o r”
In the summer of 1999, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense became
an unexpected smash hit, earning $293 million at the domestic box office, which
made it the second-highest grossing film of the year behind George Lucas’s muchanticipated Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. Even with its memorably
creepy and intriguing trailer that all but guaranteed the pop-culture permanence of
the phrase “I see dead people,” no one expected The Sixth Sense to become the phenomenon it did. After all, the horror genre had not produced a major blockbuster
since the 1970s, when The Exorcist ruled the box office in 1973 and Jaws dominated
it in 1975. The film’s star, Bruce Willis, had anchored the Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer hit Armageddon (1998) the summer before, but he was hardly a sure bet
given that his track record was also littered with recent disappointments such as
Last Man Standing (1995) and The Jackal (1997). And, at the time, few people had
heard of the writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. Even fewer knew how to pronounce his name.
As it turned out, The Sixth Sense was just the beginning of a cycle of spiritually
minded horror films that were especially evocative in tone and theme of the mideighteenth-century Graveyard School of poets, whose focus on themes of death,
human mortality, spirituality, gloom, and melancholy prefigured the eighteenthcentury Gothic novel and helped to lay the foundation of the horror genre.1 This
cycle included such films as Stir of Echoes (1999), What Lies Beneath (2000), The
Gift (2000), The Others (2001), Frailty (2001), Dragonfly (2002), White Noise (2005),
and The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2006), all of which moved away from a focus on
graphic violence and instead created a backbone of terror, dread, suspense, and
spiritual contemplation. I am thus using the term “spiritual” to refer to matters that
are often referred to as supernatural—those things that are beyond the explanatory
scope of rational and scientific understanding. However, the spiritual goes beyond
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the supernatural in the assumption that there is meaning in that which we cannot
explain in material terms, usually related to issues of life and death and what follows
our existence in the physical world. This is in keeping with a general etymological
development of the terms during which supernatural has come to describe anything
that is above the natural, whereas spiritual has a direct connection to the human
spirit, that is, the idea that being human transcends mere material existence. The
spiritual is, in some way, sacred.
The supernatural/spiritual horror film has a long history in the American cinema and has, in some sense, always run parallel to materialist horror. But the cycle
of films that emerged in the wake of The Sixth Sense is particularly important and
worthy of attention because, not only was it extremely concentrated, but it marked a
decided shift in the horror genre as it was currently constituted, which served a dual
function. First, in terms of the films themselves, it refreshed the genre by returning
it to its initial emphasis on the psychological and the spiritual over the material
and physical. This is a quite different development from the one traced by Jerrold
E. Hogle in his analysis of the Gothic at the end of the twentieth century. “Terror can return,” Hogle argues, “in a fantasy that deliberately strives to point out the
body, indeed the most primal and destructible possibilities of the body, and thereby
recover it from earlier Gothic disembodiments and the dissolution of it into myriad
simulations, large and small” (160).
Second, in economic terms, this shift in the genre attempted to mainstream
horror films (a historically marginalized genre associated with independent studios and B-level production values) by giving them a potentially broader audience
via their typical PG-13 ratings and more conventional emotional resonances. The
box office success of The Sixth Sense showed that horror movies could be hugely
profitable if geared toward a mainstream audience, rather than the niche audience
composed primarily of adolescent boys that had been the primary consumers of
contemporary horror in the 1980s. Thus, the visual excesses associated with violent
horror were toned down, eliminating one of the primary critiques of the genre (“It’s
too gory!”) and subsequent roadblocks to larger audiences. It is telling that, of the
nine films listed earlier, six were rated PG-13 and only three of them were rated R.
And even the three R-rated films (Stir of Echoes, Frailty, and The Gift) studiously
avoid the kinds of graphic violence that tended to characterize horror films of the
previous decade.2
However, this cycle has been relatively short-lived, especially since, in recent
years, increasingly graphic horror and torture movies like the Saw series (2004–
2008) and the Hostel films (2005/2006), as well as violently intensified horror
remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006),
Halloween (2007), and Friday the 13th (2009), have become the new rage. While
this might suggest that the horror genre’s embrace of the spiritual at the turn of

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the twenty-first century was a brief, temporary detour en route to its final resting
place in the physical, it is more likely another arc in the constant evolution of the
genre, which over the decades has swung back and forth with varying degrees of
force between the visceral and the suggestive, the graphic and the contemplative, the
material and the spiritual.3

T h e H o r r o r F i l m i n t h e 1990s
The widespread popularity of The Sixth Sense was particularly surprising because, by the summer of 1999, the mainstream horror genre did not appear
to have room for moody, elegant, supernatural films aimed at a wide audience. At
that time, the horror genre, which was on an upswing from virtual nonexistence in
the early 1990s, was known primarily for a series of self-conscious updates of the
slasher film, a subgenre that had all but dominated horror in the 1980s. The slasher
film has been defined by Carol Clover as “the immensely generative story of a psycho
killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is
subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived” (21). Steeped in formula,
these films developed into long-running franchises aimed at primarily teenage audiences: Friday the 13th (eight installments between 1980 and 1989); Halloween (five
installments between 1978 and 1989); A Nightmare on Elm Street (five installments
between 1984 and 1989). The seemingly endless string of sequels, spin-offs, and ripoffs reinforced the perception of most critics and moral watchdogs that such films
were bankrupt artistically, if not morally, further shoving the horror genre into the
illicit margins of cultural detritus.
Thus, by the early to mid-1990s there was a perception that the horror genre
was all but dead. A 1994 article in Daily Variety questioned the future of horror
films, suggesting that recent box office failures and a significant drop-off in home
video sales of horror titles portended the end of a “tired” genre that had been recently
glutted with “mediocre product” (Klady 13). This is despite the fact that, similar to
the efforts of Stanley Kubrick and Paul Schrader in the early 1980s, the early 1990s
had witnessed a concerted effort by well-regarded filmmakers to reclaim the horror
genre with big-budget, star-studded, “intellectual” horror films that were, in effect,
grandiose Gothic fantasies. The trend kicked off with Francis Ford Coppola’s audacious reimagining of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a financially successful film that
merged music video romanticism with ample gore and a film-lovers’ cavalcade of
references to old-school filmmaking techniques.4 It was followed by a more serious
and less popular take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), which Coppola produced after handing the directorial reigns over to British director Kenneth Branagh,
who at the time was best known for his Shakespeare adaptations. That same year

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saw the release of Mike Nichols’s urban werewolf satire Wolf and Neil Jordan’s lavish adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, which caused no end of
controversy in the casting of megastar Tom Cruise as the infamous vampire Lestat.
In the mid- to late 1990s, the genre was dominated by the reemergence of the
slasher film in updated, postmodern guise (Wee). While intertextuality and selfreferentiality had been elements of the horror genre for years (Brophy), it was especially foregrounded in the so-called postmodern slasher film. Scream (1996), which
was written by young newcomer Kevin Williamson but directed by genre veteran
Wes Craven, led the way in self-consciously playing with the basic parameters of
the slasher film by introducing self-aware would-be victims as a filmic reflection
of the young, media-savvy, self-aware audience. If the endless sequels of the 1980s
had begun to alienate even the most devoted horror fans, Scream drew them back
by playing to their preexisting knowledge about the genre. Interestingly, Craven had
ventured into similar waters two years earlier with New Nightmare (1994), an imaginative spin-off from his popular A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in which those
involved with making the original movie, including star Heather Langenkamp and
Craven himself, played themselves being terrorized by the series’ bogeyman Freddy
Krueger, who had broken free of his celluloid prison and infiltrated the “real world.”
New Nightmare was not a hit with audiences, perhaps because it was too self-reflexive, or perhaps because fans were simply tired of seeing Freddy Krueger after six
films in fewer than ten years.
Scream, however, was a huge success both critically and commercially. It featured a cast of popular young stars, many of whom were drawn from television
(including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, and Courtney Cox), and it stroked its
viewers’ egos by playing to their preexisting genre knowledge. It earned $103 million
at the U.S. box office, a rarity for even the most popular horror films, and was, therefore, not surprisingly followed by two sequels, one in 1997 and one in 2000. It also
led to an avalanche of new teen horror movies and sequels whose producers hoped
to cash in on Scream’s success: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and its
1998 sequel I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Disturbing Behavior (1998),
The Faculty (1998), Urban Legend (1998) and its 2000 sequel Urban Legends: Final
Cut, and Final Destination (2000) and its two sequels (2003 and 2006). The striking
similarity of the promotional posters used to advertise these films, which invariably
involve some arrangement of the main characters in front of the looming image of
the film’s killer, suggests just how akin the films are in both their approach to horror
and their desired audience.
The new flurry of horror films also led to the resurrection of several dormant
franchises, including Halloween (1998’s Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, which
brought original star Jamie Lee Curtis back into the series, and 2002’s Halloween:
Resurrection), Friday the 13th (2001’s Jason X, which sent the hockey-mask-wearing

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slasher into space), and Child’s Play (1998’s Bride of Chucky and 2004’s Seed of Chucky,
both of which are dark, tongue-in-cheek comedies). As the last two examples suggest, there was an air of self-parody growing in the horror genre, especially after
the release the Wayan Brothers’ Scary Movie (2000) and its three sequels, not to
mention a decade of “Treehouse of Horror” episodes on The Simpsons. The majority of these teen-centric horror films, despite their sometimes clever postmodern
trappings, fell victim to the same criticisms inflicted on 1980s slasher films: tired
commercial garbage whose cheeky self-referencing was just a thin façade to hide an
otherwise uncomplicated and incessantly perverse fascination with creative means
of violent death.
Thus, because the genre was glutted with films that focused primarily on violence, with no consideration as to what happened after the knife (or axe . . . or saw
. . . or meat cleaver . . .) had been sunk, The Sixth Sense, which was released just
three years after Scream had self-reflexively rewritten the horror genre, appeared
to be something new and different. With its reverently hushed tones, burnished
cinematography, and air of grave sincerity, it was a horror movie for people who
didn’t like horror movies. More important, it was a horror movie that asked to
be taken seriously in its evocation of life after death. It had human characters,
rather than cardboard victims, and it dealt with relationships, both familial and
spiritual. For many it was an emotional experience, wringing a wide spectrum of
responses; audiences both jumped in their seats and welled up with tears at the
end, even as they marveled at the narrative gymnastics that unfolded so fluidly
in the unexpected twist ending. And it didn’t feature a single teenage character or
knife-wielding psychopath.
Rather than focusing on the earthly, physical fears of sudden bodily damage,
The Sixth Sense focused on the afterlife. What happens after we die? What is the
relationship between the living and the dead? What, in fact, is the nature of death
itself? These are questions that are certainly not new to the horror genre; in fact,
according to some histories, such questions are the very root of the genre, which
began with the Graveyard School of poets in the mid-eighteenth century. In turning
to such issues, The Sixth Sense paved the way for a cycle of horror films that returned
to the genre’s spiritual roots in the graveyard.

T h e G r av e ya r d S c h o o l
Although there are traces of what we would now consider “horror” in
works as ancient as Homer’s The Odyssey, the origins of the contemporary horror genre are usually traced back to late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
English Gothic literature, especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Dr. John

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Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819), “two of the most enduring outgrowths of the
traditional Gothic tale of terror” (Tropp 28).
The term “Gothic” has a long and somewhat conflicted history of shifting meanings, beginning with reference to the medieval German tribes known as “Goths.” As
a result, in English the term “Gothic” came to refer to all things primitive, chaotic,
superstitious, and excessive—essentially those negative qualities associated with the
“Dark Ages” from the perspective of the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, which
prized reason, logic, and rationality. However, Gothic history was rewritten in England in the mid-eighteenth century to celebrate those primitive qualities that had
previously been dismissed as contrary to civilization (Punter and Byron 7–8).
The connection between the Gothic and the horror genre derives from the use
of the word Gothic to describe a literary movement that began in the late 1700s as
a reaction against neoclassicism and is variably viewed as either the predecessor
of Romanticism or a simultaneous variant of it. While the generally agreed-upon
first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the best-known
works of the “High Gothic” period were written between 1790 and the 1820s, which
“is very nearly synchronic with the Romantic period” (McEvoy 19). Regardless of
how it is dated, Gothic literature produced many novels and stories built around
recurring images, motifs, and themes that would come to be associated with the
horror genre: an emphasis on the past, the exploration of the aesthetics of fear, and
the merging of fantasy and reality (Spooner and McEvoy 1). Even more obvious are
the formal qualities that include supernatural elements and settings that emphasize
death and decay. It is also worth noting that, as David Punter points out, Gothic
fiction lends itself quite readily to psychoanalytic thought, which has been one of
the most oft-utilized critical approaches to the inner workings and subtexts of the
horror genre.
However, to truly understand horror we need to dig back deeper into history,
past the Romantic and Gothic traditions to which it is typically traced, to the Graveyard School of poets, whose contributions to the horror genre have been consistently
understated, if not ignored. If horror is usually traced back to Gothic literature, then
Graveyard poetry must be considered one of its deeper roots, given the fact that, as
Punter and Byron note, “it prefigures the Gothic novel in several ways” (10), most
notably in its rejection of the ideal of rational understanding and its emphasis on
the sublime. While Edmund Burke’s Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757) is often referenced as the first significant connection between sublimity—in
which the mind reels in the presence of something greater than itself—and terror,
the Graveyard poets were exploring such ideas in verse several decades earlier. For
example, Punter and Byron interpret Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death,”
which was first published in 1722, as follows: “To learn wisdom, it is necessary to
take a quicker and more frightening path, which is the path not of reason but of

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intense feeling [. . .] from prolonged and absorbed meditation on [life’s] extreme
limit: death” (11). Thus, the Graveyard poets were among the first to recognize that
deep insights into life could only emerge from ruminating on death, which meant
that such insights were inextricably linked to terror.
Parnell and the other Graveyard poets emerged primarily in England in the
first half of the eighteenth century and spread via imitation to other European
countries and across the ocean to New England before falling beneath the shadow
of the Gothic and Romantic writers they helped inspire. The influential nature of
their works can be seen in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s discussion in his Biographia
Literaria (1817) of Friedrich Schiller’s play The Robbers (1781). Coleridge notes that
the German translation of Edward Young’s nine-volume graveyard poem The Complaint; or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742–1745) was one of the
three most popular books in Germany in the years before Schiller wrote his play
and that Schiller clearly borrowed “the strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics, and solemn epigrams” of Young’s poem and then added “horrific incidents, and
mysterious villains [. . .] the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts” (183–84; see also Miles 11). Furthermore, Coleridge
also traces these devices to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel.
Thus, in this instance we can see a clear lineage from the Graveyard poets to English
Gothic literature to German drama. Despite such influence, though, the Graveyard
poets are no longer read as frequently as their Gothic followers. Nevertheless, their
work remains crucial to understanding where the horror genre derived much of its
iconography, even if the genre as a whole has largely discarded the Graveyard poets’
thematic underpinnings of spirituality.
Although the writers included under the label “Graveyard School” worked
independently of each other, they collectively established much of the fundamental
imagery of the modern horror genre decades before it made its way into English
Gothic literature. Initially inspired by medieval funeral elegies and the use of melancholy in English poetry, these writers were among the first to focus their attention
on death, darkness, ruins, and decay—“everything, indeed, that was excluded by
rational culture” (Botting 32). Poems such as the aforementioned “A Night-Piece
on Death” and The Complaint; or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality,
as well as Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard” (1751) were among the first to be set in graveyards and feature
Death as a character. They established the skin-crawling use of such lasting images
as ravens, creepy yew trees, decomposing bodies, skeletal remains, and dank crypts,
all of which would feed the fervid imaginations of everyone from Edgar Allen Poe
to George A. Romero.
It is not as though such images had never occurred in other forms of art and
literature prior to the poets of the Graveyard School. Rather, what makes their

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contribution so crucial to the formation of the horror genre was their coupling of
such images not just to the frightening nature of death itself, but to whatever it
is that comes after. This was partially because their work appeared at a historical
moment when attitudes regarding death were in transition:
The new attitude found death frightening, but that wasn’t and isn’t the worst.
The worst is just what the Graveyard poets and their precursors held up as
death’s negation: the hope or belief that the dead will rise, bodies and all, on
the Day of Judgment. Trust in that rising gave way, within two generations of
the Graveyard poets, to a fear that has not abated: that the dead will rise and
in fact do rise, all the time, the moment you turn your back on them. (Kendrick 21–22)
Thus, while the poems were often graphic in their descriptions of death and
decay, the purpose of the Graveyard poets’ work was intently spiritual, as virtually
all of it came from clergymen who likely drew inspiration from the graveyards they
saw out the windows of their church dwellings every day (Cameron 15–20). As the
literary historian Walter Kendrick notes, “Though the horrors they invoked were
those of the flesh, they desired to admonish the spirit” (10). In other words, they
had a specifically didactic purpose in visually illustrating for readers the logical ends
of physical materiality in the hopes of turning their attention to eternal spiritual
matters.
The underlying theme of Graveyard poetry, then, is that life is redeemed by the
promise of an afterlife. While the poems tend to focus on the gruesome, physical
details of death, which is frequently personified as a frightening physical presence,
the goal is to encourage the reader to ponder the transient nature of life on earth and
the temporary pleasures it affords. Many of the poems read like sermons in verse
form, warning against sinfulness and a godless existence and encouraging readers to
transcend their earthly fears of the ugliness of death through faith in the afterlife. In
fact, Kenneth Walter Cameron suggests that Graveyard poetry was a conscious and
direct response to the eighteenth-century rise of deism and atheism, which forced
pastors and priests to find “potent illustrations for frightening their people into the
path of virtue and faith” (18).
Interestingly, the Graveyard School’s poems served a dual, and somewhat contradictory, function. As we have seen, their poems reinterpreted the physicality of
death in spiritual terms, positing graveyards and corpses as objects on which to
meditate in order to understand the redeeming nature of the afterlife. However, as
Kendrick points out, they also paved the way for turning the grotesquerie of death
into aesthetic appreciation. Kendrick particularly notes how Parnell’s “A NightPiece on Death” differed from its predecessor, the funeral elegy, by detaching grief

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from a specific individual’s death and turning it into poetry that could be sold for
profit. This process continued into subsequent Gothic literature, which drew from
the Graveyard poets’ horrific imagery, but discarded the spiritual content, resulting
in a literature that stressed how “there is something inherent in our very mortality
that dooms us to a life of incomprehension, a life in which we are forever sunk in
mysteries and unable to escape from the deathly consequences of our physical form”
(Punter and Byron 12). Thus, even though the avowed intention of the Graveyard
poets was to encourage their readers to consider spiritual issues by bringing them
face-to-face with the gory realities of death and decay, they also began the process
by which modern horror would eliminate such concerns in favor of gross-out thrills,
“until tombs and skulls lost whatever connection they once had to anybody’s real
death and became the icons of a new kind of entertainment” (Kendrick 14).

T h e I n t e r s e c t i o n o f t h e S p i r i t ua l a n d t h e P h ys i c a l
It is not surprising that the horror genre took a more spiritual turn at
the end of the 1990s because, at the time, it seemed that the entire American film
industry was caught up in fin-de-siècle-inspired renewal of spirituality and religion
that infiltrated virtually every genre. In the early 1990s, there had been a brief cycle
of life-after-death films led by Ghost (1990) and Jacob’s Ladder (1991), both of which
were written by Bruce Joel Rubin, but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that
this theme kicked into full gear. Kevin Smith played with Catholic doctrine in his
comedy Dogma (1999), while A Life Less Ordinary (1997) made screwball antics out
of angelic intervention; the romantic melodrama was given a spiritual twist when
an angel falls in love with a mortal in City of Angels (1998) and a man in heaven tries
to save his suicidal wife’s condemnation to hell in What Dreams May Come (1998);
Contact (1997) went beyond usual science fiction trappings to ruminate on the existence of God, the essence of faith, and the conflict between science and religion;
meanwhile, Spawn (1997), one of the few comic book heroes to make it to the big
screen in the late 1990s, was forged in hell; even an Arnold Schwarzenegger action
vehicle was recast in religious-spiritual terms in the apocalyptic End of Days (1999).
In this sense, then, it seems all the more natural that the horror genre, whose roots
can be traced back to the church graveyard, also took a spiritual turn.
However, it is important to note that, like the films just mentioned, the majority of spiritual horror films released at this time did not adhere to any particular
spiritual tenets or religious beliefs. Most likely for the sake of avoiding controversy
and selling as many tickets as possible in the process, the spiritual nature of these
films was kept deliberately vague in terms of religious affiliation—a sort of “grab bag”
approach that borrows liberally from Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and various

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New Age belief systems without specifically citing any well-known figures, texts, or
creeds.5 So, unlike the Graveyard poets, whose works were specifically Christian in
theology and intent, Hollywood films in the late 1990s, and many horror films in
particular, took a generally open, abstract approach to issues of spirituality, borrowing liberally from many theological schools without adhering to any one.
“You Don’t Know So Many Things”
This spiritual turn in the horror genre took a number of different forms, but they all
hinged on the intersection of the physical and spiritual worlds, the purpose of which
was usually to impart the idea that the spiritual world has something important
to tell us. In this respect, spiritual horror films employ the same Freudian concept
of “the return of the repressed,” which is often identified as a crucial component
in modern horror by numerous scholars. While Robin Wood has most memorably linked repression to cultural issues such as race, gender, and sexuality, here it
becomes a mode for thinking about spirituality—not just how the spiritual dimension had been largely repressed in horror films in favor of visceral physical violence
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but also how characters within the films themselves tend to repress or deny the existence of the spiritual. The most incisive example and direct model for so many subsequent horror films is The Exorcist (1973),
which dared to take seriously the idea of demonic possession and place it in direct
opposition to medical science. Throughout the film the idea that twelve-year-old
Regan’s changes in behavior have a supernatural explanation are repressed in favor
of medical and scientific tests that are intent on finding neurological illness, but are
ultimately shown to be fruitless. Similarly, characters in the spiritual horror films of
the late 1990s resist, at least initially, the invasion of their rational, physical realities
by the spiritual realm.
This operation is clearly at work in The Sixth Sense via the character of Dr.
Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), whose profession in psychology immediately marks
him as a rational man who adheres to scientific, medical principles in attempting to
help mentally disturbed children. And, while his work has earned him accolades and
praise from his community and peers—most notably from the mayor of Philadelphia, who has awarded him “The Mayor’s Citation for Professional Excellence”—it
does not equip him to deal with children who have the supernatural ability to see
ghosts; that is, children whose consciousness can connect simultaneously with the
physical and spiritual realms.
Malcolm’s inability to diagnosis his patients in anything other than rational, scientific terms results in a literal return of the repressed in the form of Vincent Grey
(Donnie Wahlberg), a former child patient who breaks into Malcolm’s home and
shoots him and then himself in a fit of emotional desperation. The torment endured
by Vincent as a result of his never being able to come to terms with his special gift

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of seeing dead people—something that both Malcolm and the audience don’t realize until well into the film—serves as a warning about the dangers of ignoring the
spiritual in favor of the physical. “You don’t know so many things,” is the first thing
Vincent tells Malcolm, a clear indication that the good doctor’s medical training has
ill-equipped him to help people like Vincent whose spiritual torment is written off
in meaningless medical terms (“possible mood disorder”). This statement could very
well be seen as the calling card of spiritual horror films, admonishing the self-aware
audience that they know, in fact, much less than they think.
Malcolm’s eventual realization that his new patient, ten-year-old Cole Sear
(Haley Joel Osment), can truly “see dead people” (the gift with which Vincent was
also “cursed”) emboldens Malcolm to help the boy understand and make peace
with this connection, rather than trying to “cure” him. In other words, he finally
accepts the spiritual and its role in our physical world, which means that, at its
core, The Sixth Sense is a conversion narrative, which is typical of supernatural
horror films.6 However, the difference is that Malcolm not only accepts the existence of the supernatural, but is at peace with it; that is, he discovers that it is not
something to be feared, but rather embraced. Malcolm is not immediately open
to this possibility, as he resists believing Cole when the boy first confides in him,
preferring instead to assess his seeing dead people as “visual hallucinations, paranoia, and some kind of school-age schizophrenia.” The fundamental element of
Malcolm’s repression of the spiritual is his inability to realize that he is, in fact, a
ghost himself, one of the ones Cole says “don’t know they’re dead”; thus, the film’s
final moments following this grand realization mark his complete acceptance of
realms outside the physical and his connection to them. The irony is that the conversion is complete—Malcolm believes in life after death—only after he has made
the transition.
We can see conversion narratives operating in several other films, as well,
including Stigmata (1999), Dragonfly (2001), and The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005),
all of which feature characters who are self-professed atheists until they come face to
face with the invasion of the material world by the spiritual. For example, the central
character in Dragonfly is Dr. Joe Morrow (Kevin Costner), a successful Chicago
doctor who is mourning the death of his wife Emily (Susanna Thompson), who
was killed in Venezuela while on a Red Cross relief mission to help sick children. It
is established early on that Joe is an atheist who does not believe in an afterlife, but
following a few strange, seemingly supernatural occurrences, including several child
patients in the pediatric oncology ward who all draw the same squiggly cross symbol and tell Joe that they have spoken with Emily during near-death experiences,
he becomes convinced that her spirit is trying to reach him. Thus, like Malcolm,
Joe is converted into a belief in life after death through direct experiences with the
supernatural.

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Similarly, Frankie Page (Patricia Arquette), the young hairdresser in Stigmata,
and Erin Bruner (Laura Linney), the hard-driving attorney in The Exorcism of
Emily Rose, are both opened to the possibilities of God and an afterlife when their
lives are directly affected by the supernatural. Interestingly, both films present their
encounters with the supernatural in violent, frightening terms: Frankie is struck
with the stigmata, the sudden appearance on her body of Christ’s wounds, and Erin
is stalked in her apartment by a threatening, unseen force. Yet their experiences
put them at odds with organized religion, specifically the Catholic Church, which
is at pains to maintain control over how the spiritual is experienced. Thus, unlike
the Graveyard School of poets, these films are explicitly anti-clerical, even as they
reify the existence of something beyond our rational understanding. Stigmata is
particularly troubling in this respect, as it willfully confuses elements of Catholic
dogma to suit its own narrative ends, such as presenting the stigmata, traditionally
understood as a physical manifestation of a deep spiritual connection to God, as a
virus-like form of demonic possession that can be passed on from a religious object
and manipulated by dark forces.
The Dead Won’t Stay Dead: Justice from beyond the Grave
By far the most popular narrative in spiritual horror is a variation on this “return
of the repressed” theme in which an unjustly murdered person makes contact with
the living in order to solve the mystery of his or her death. The frequency with
which this particular narrative appeared over a short period of time in The Sixth
Sense, What Lies Beneath, Stir of Echoes, and The Gift, as well as its use as purposeful
misdirection in Dragonfly, illustrates its potency. It plays a crucial role in The Sixth
Sense, although it doesn’t develop until the final third of the film. By this point, the
relationship between Cole and Malcolm has already been firmly established, as has
the nature of Cole’s special “gift”: his ability to see dead people, not all of whom realize they are dead and many of whom have proved threatening to him, both psychologically and physically (his withdrawn nature being evidence of the former, while
vicious red welts on his arms and body represent the latter).
Cole is eventually drawn into the death of Kyra Collins (Mischa Barton), a
child his age who died under mysterious circumstances. Kyra’s ghost differs from
the others Cole has come across because she seeks him out. Cole’s other run-ins
with ghosts—at least the ones we see in the film—are all linked to the place of their
deaths. Thus, we assume that the angry, abused housewife and the teenager who
accidentally shot himself with his father’s gun, both of whom Cole encounters in
his mother’s apartment, were previous tenants, just as the bicyclist with the broken neck at the end of the film is seen near the site of her deadly accident and the
women accused of being witches hang from the rafters in the courthouse-turnedschoolhouse. Kyra, however, lived and died in the suburbs a lengthy bus ride away

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from Cole’s urban apartment, which suggests that she has somehow sought him out,
suspecting that he would be willing to go to her funeral and unearth the truth of
her death. Cole does this by discovering a video recording that accidentally caught
Kyra’s mother poisoning her soup in a willful effort to keep her sick, an act that
explains the young girl’s death not as the result of a lengthy, inexplicable illness, but
as the sad result her mother’s psychological disorder.
Kyra’s various ghostly appearances are both frightening and sad, which underscores Shyamalan’s vision of the interaction between the spiritual and the physical
realms. The ghosts Cole sees are frightening because they are not part of his world,
but they each in their own way reflect the shortcomings of life on earth. Thus, in
true Graveyard School fashion, the ghosts of The Sixth Sense each represent some
form of sin and shortcoming, whether it be careless parenting, spousal abuse, infanticide, or political persecution.
This operation is at work in several other spiritual horror films as well. In What
Lies Beneath, a supernatural thriller directed by Robert Zemeckis—while he waited
for Tom Hanks to lose weight and grow out his hair and beard for his role as a
man stranded on an island in Cast Away (2000)—the ghost of a murdered college student begins haunting the home of Norman and Claire Spencer (Harrison
Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer), whose seemingly perfect life, best embodied in their
elegantly appointed, but comfortably homey lakefront estate, is a façade for dark
secrets. When the film begins, they are taking their daughter to college for the first
time, and Claire is left with empty-nest syndrome. Taking one of many pages from
Alfred Hitchcock, the first third of the film is willfully misleading as it borrows a
scenario from Rear Window (1954) in which Claire watches their neighbors through
binoculars because she suspects the husband, who works at the same university as
Norman, to have murdered his wife.
However, it soon becomes clear that the focus of the film is supernatural, as the
presence of a mysterious woman becomes undeniable, at least to Claire. A particular picture falls to the floor, the front door breathes itself open, a bathtub upstairs
mysteriously fills itself with steaming water, voices whisper in the dark. These events
happen only to Claire, and Norman is less than understanding because he feels that
Claire’s experiences are simply a way for her to bring attention to herself and distract
him from his work. Not knowing whether these experiences are real or imagined,
Claire becomes determined to find out who the ghost is and what she wants. The
narrative is turned on its head at the end when she discovers that the girl whose
ghost is haunting the house was murdered by her own husband, which shifts the
source of fear from the spiritual to the physical. However, the role of the spiritual
realm is heightened in the film’s climax as the murdered girl’s ghost literally takes her
murderer down with her, emphasizing that, as Kendrick notes, “the dead will rise
and in fact do rise, all the time, the moment you turn your back on them” (21–22).

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Co n c lu s i o n
By returning to the original roots of the horror genre that were initially laid down
by the eighteenth-century Graveyard poets—which included themes of death,
human mortality, spirituality, gloom, and melancholy to underpin images of carnage and decay—horror filmmakers in the late 1990s returned the genre to a more
contemplative terrain. One consequence of this shift was an increase of respectability for horror in general. For the first time since the early 1970s, some horror
films were being taken seriously by the popular critical community. The Sixth Sense
received such widespread critical praise that it was recognized by the industry via
nominations for six Academy Awards, including the top awards of Best Picture,
Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. While none of the subsequent spiritual
horror films reached that level of critical consensus, many mainstream film critics
gave these films uniformly good notices, although the praise tended to subside as
more and more tonally and thematically similar films appeared at the box office,
each amping up the potentially maudlin emotional nature of ghosts speaking to the
living. By the time Dragonfly limped into theaters in February 2002, the Washington
Post critic Stephen Hunter could describe it as “touchy-feely-creepy-icky” (C05).
Part of the reason for these films’ critical acceptance and widespread popularity is arguably their focus on broadly spiritual matters, rather than abject physical
horror. They include just enough horrific imagery, foreboding music, and jumpin-your-seats moments to qualify as horror in most people’s minds, but without
the gore and splatter effects that had defined horror films over the previous two
decades. This is not surprising, as critics have long drawn a line of demarcation
between supernatural horror and violent horror, with the former being associated
with respectable high culture while the latter is generally associated with disrespectable low culture. Ivan Butler addresses this directly in his classic work Horror
in the Cinema when he writes:
Almost any degree of horror will prove acceptable to an audience provided it
appears to fit into the context and not to be gratuitously thrown in to satisfy
their own presumed taste for violence. When a spectator of normal sensibility
revolts it is invariably because the film seems to be indulging in beastliness for
its own sake, to be enjoying cruelty. (18)
As Gregory Waller points out in his introduction to American Horrors, Butler’s
book, as well as Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction
Films and S. S. Prawer’s Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror are “based on
the assumption that truly effective horror is always indirect and suggestive, leaving
the horrific primarily to the viewer’s imagination” (7).

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Yet, such a restrained approach to horror is generally short-lived, as filmmakers
seek to draw attention to their films by pushing the envelope and showing in detail
what others have left to the imagination. Thus, just as the works of the Graveyard
poets were quickly subsumed by the more sensational and less spiritually minded
Gothic writers that followed them, the sudden rise of the spiritual horror film in the
late 1990s was matched by a similarly rapid fall as audiences turned their attention
to a new wave of graphically violent horror films that made increasingly visceral gore
the centerpiece of the genre once again. Led by James Wan’s Saw and epitomized
most directly in Eli Roth’s Hostel, this new development has become so popular
that a name was even been coined for the new group of directors who have made
their mark with such films: “The Splat Pack.”7 The reasons for this shift are myriad,
ranging from audience and critical fatigue of the increasingly similar spiritual horror films, to a general movement in film aesthetics toward a more intensified and
hyperkinetic visual approach that favors visceral thrills over contemplative interiority, to cultural issues such as the war in Iraq and its associated images of torture at
Abu Ghraib. Perhaps it is because imaginary scenarios of supernatural apocalyptic
turmoil tied to the year 2000 have given way to the more mundane, though no less
horrific, realities of a world torn by strife, terrorism, and war, and as they tend to
do, horror films have responded accordingly. Whatever the reason, it seems that the
spiritual has largely taken a backseat, but as the history of the horror genre shows
us again and again, nothing can be repressed forever.

N ot e s
1. For a more detailed discussion, see Walter Kendrick, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary
Entertainment (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 10–22.
2. Although the story in Frailty is, for example, about a man who believes God has
commanded him to kill demons hiding in human form with an axe, director Bill Paxton keeps
virtually every bit of bloodshed off-screen.
3. For example, one can note a decided swing in the genre between the Universal horror films
of the 1930s and the Val Lewton-produced horror films for RKO in the 1940s. As Carlos Clarens
argues, Lewton’s films “stand out as chamber music against the seedy bombast of the claw-andfang epics of the day” (An Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction Films: The Classic Era,
1895–1967 [New York: De Capo Press, 1967], 111).
4. Bram Stoker’s Dracula earned $82 million at the domestic box office, making it the
fifteenth-highest grossing film of the year in U.S. theaters. Significantly, the only other traditional
horror film to crack the top fifty of the year was Candyman (49th).
5. For example, much of the heaven-and-hell scenario in What Dreams May Come (1998)
is based on traditional Judeo-Christian notions of immortal life after death, but certain aspects
are slightly twisted or bolstered with a New Age mentality and aspects of other religions. For
instance, despite the existence of heaven and hell, reincarnation is still an option, and although
the movie admits the existence of God, he is still left as an uninvolved abstraction, someone

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who, even to those souls in heaven, is still “up there” and has no interaction with them. Heaven
itself is essentially individualistic, where each soul creates his or her own utopian universe in
which to spend eternity. The film also avoids explicitly stating the criteria that determine who
goes where. Although a large majority of the film takes place in a hell (most of the characters go
out of their way to avoid referring to it by that word) that is filled with many lost souls, there
is never any explanation of what they did to cause their damnation. Similarly, Stephen Hunter
in the Washington Post described Dragonfly (2002) as “essentially an endorsement of a generic,
nondenominational afterlife—Heaven without brand names” (C05).
6. For a more detailed discussion, see, for example, Carol Clover, Men, Women, and
Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992),
66.
7. This moniker for such directors as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Alexandre Aja, and James Wan
was coined by Alan Jones in the online magazine Total Film.

T h e Au t e u r Is a Zo m b i e
To the average mainstream video consumer accustomed to Blockbuster
or Hollywood, the independent, “alternative” video store must appear a sort of
Borgesian nightmare. Where the chains wallpaper their stores with new releases
and shelve “older” films broadly by genre (drama, comedy, horror), the independents
subdivide and re-categorize relentlessly. Foreign films may be divided by country—
logical enough, given the larger selection than in the chains—and then divided
again by genre (e.g., “J-horror”). There will probably be a large “Cult” section, organized according to a manager’s whim. And then there is the defining feature of the
alternatives: the “Directors” section, invariably organized alphabetically, where the
alphabet is understood to be the great leveler of the global cinematic canon. Generic
comedies and dramas, which together with new releases form the bulk of the chain
video stores’ wares, are the alternatives’ leftovers.
Auteur theory, it appears, did its job too well: the force that impelled film into the
academy has survived a series of attempts on its life, often by reinventing itself in the
guises of its would-be assassins.1 Perhaps, as Peter Wollen once suggested, the theory’s
resilience is a product of its particular relevance to America. After all, it was those rugged individualists carving out territories inside the relatively more hospitable terrain
of genre (territories already settled, of course, but only by the heathen), and circling
their wagons against the hostile glare of the studios, whose canonization caused such
a scandal. Ironically, the author’s death was pronounced at the moment when he was
deemed to have arrived in Hollywood: the so-called director-as-superstar era (Wood,
Hollywood 87). And if academics and film journalists have never managed to end their
ambivalent, five-decade love affair with the auteur, it should come as no surprise that
many liberally educated members of the general public (i.e., those who took a few
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film courses in college) remain enamored. In fact, I would speculate that a series of
developments—the greater access to production information through the Internet;
DVD packages featuring commentary tracks by “star” directors; and critics like Leonard Maltin appending a by-director section to the end of his immensely popular Video
and Movie Guide—has fixed the auteur in the minds of more American moviegoers
than at any time since the theory was first espoused.
It is true that contemporary film criticism and journalism have a more sophisticated conception of the auteur than did those French mavericks who wielded him
as a polemical hammer half a century ago. As the theory has accommodated itself
to structuralism and poststructuralism, the auteur has devolved from transcendent
cause to a “bundle of libidinous energies” set forth by psyche/society (Wexman 7),
and finally to a “commercial strategy for organizing [audience] reception,” a “shell”
of “material publicity” which has “effectively vacated the agency of a metaphysics of
expressive causality and textual authority” (Corrigan 104, 118). To an extent, these
academic resurrections of authorship have responded to broader cultural and technological shifts in production and consumption that have impacted, and continue
to impact, the way texts are produced and consumed, and hence the way authorship is experienced by the broader public. And yet, if the auteur has indeed fallen
from cause to commodity, I would argue that what is marketed is the nostalgia for
authority itself. That is, in a time of fragmented authorship (Browning 40) and even
more fragmented (hyper)consumption (Corrigan 27–29), the auteur appears as a
harbor of stable meaning and authority, evoking a nostalgia similar to that Timothy
Corrigan identified in contemporary audiences for lost collective rituals (15). Corrigan also notes that the auteur originally served to attract audiences to theaters by
giving film a “romantic aura” that distinguished it from television (102). With the
latter-day impact of television and home-viewing technologies on film production,
however, film and auteur have come to reside in an interzone between the former’s
romantic aura as art, and the purely commercial “producer’s medium” of television.
Film, so to speak, is unable to die and become “just TV”; it “lives” like Videodrome’s
Brian O’Blivion . . . only now in letterbox.
The vacated agency of the romantic auteur, the limbo between (living) art and
(dead) image—what could be more reminiscent of the zombie? It is a particularly
fitting figure for those directors who have staked their artistic claim in the horror genre. Here, what fascinates me is not so much film culture’s and criticism’s
continued preoccupation with the auteur, as the manner in which not genre per
se, but the horror genre impinges upon a director’s status as an auteur.2 For while
auteur theory served to rescue some genre cinema from the prejudice that all genre
cinema was mindless fodder, the auteur label has always sat least easily with horror. Hitchcock was never called a “suspense auteur,” or Ford a “Western auteur.” But
“horror auteur”—that “oxymoronic montage of the idiosyncratic and conventional”

(Hantke 182)—is commonly employed to describe that group of directors who,
taken together, formed a sort of shadow equivalent of the “superstars.” Today, a director who makes one or two moderately interesting horror films is quickly labeled a
“horror auteur” (most recently, Larry Fessenden of The Last Winter) and compared
to the 1970s patriarchs. This is at once a fine instance of the marketing of auteur
nostalgia, and a further indication that the contemporary horror director’s auteur
status remains circumscribed by the genre.
An example: when I tried to find a Cronenberg movie at Tower Video (the
only alternative video store in Salt Lake City, where I went to graduate school), I
could go to either of two sections: “Cult” or “Directors.” In the “Cult” section were all
of Cronenberg’s early movies up through Videodrome (1982). In the “Directors” section were Cronenberg’s later films. There are multiple ironies here. While it is true
that Cronenberg deliberately turned to commercial genre filmmaking with Shivers
(1975), it has been argued that Cronenberg’s aesthetic was “closer” to his personal
vision in his earlier films than in later ones. Cronenberg wrote every film up through
Videodrome; since The Dead Zone (1983), he has chosen either to adapt a preexisting work or to revise a screenplay.3 More disturbing, the cult/director division
here cleaved Cronenberg’s career into low-budget independent and bigger-budget,
sometimes studio-financed projects—a typical bias toward moneyed horror films as
being more “serious,” hardly the conception of cinema one would associate with an
alternative video store. The director’s turn to “art” movies, generally agreed to have
begun with Dead Ringers (1988), had thus managed to redeem his better-budgeted
projects, but not his earlier “exploitation” films. This is not to say that there aren’t
aesthetic and thematic differences between “early” and “late” Cronenberg films, but
rather that at least one alternative video market could not reconcile the grotesque
violence and low budgets of Cronenberg’s early, highly original films with the idea of
the auteur—at least, not until Cronenberg had made enough “late” movies that the
earlier genre films had been sufficiently diluted. (I confess that, every time I rented
a movie at Tower, I would surreptitiously move the early Cronenberg films from
the “Cult” to the “Directors” section—an indication more of my own hang-up with
legitimizing the horror genre than with auteur theory.)
Fast forward fifteen years, to Kim’s Video, New York’s alternative mini-chain.
Today—or maybe just in New York, at the Morningside Kim’s—the complete
Cronenberg corpus is available in the “Directors” section, on both tape and DVD.
But when I go to the R’s . . . Rohmer . . . Rossellini . . . where is Romero? Romero,
it turns out, is shelved in the “Cult” section, though a special subset of this section called “Cult Directors,” which seems to be reserved largely for washed-up horror directors—Tobe Hooper is there—or ones who have gone more mainstream,
I guess, like Wes Craven. I could swear that Romero used to be in the “Directors”
section. But time has not been kind to Romero. The Romero zombie may be the

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single most recognizable icon of the horror genre today, but the man who made the
stumbling, flesh-eating ghoul famous and worthy of reams of critical scrutiny seems
to have joined them in anonymity. Thus, as Cronenberg is retroactively dubbed an
auteur and finds his early horror movies moved from the “Cult” section to their
rightful place in the “Directors” section, Romero is demoted from the “Directors”
section to the “Cult” section, albeit to a special wing, in the select company of his
peers. God forbid that, in five years, he finds his films dispersed throughout the
“Horror” section, organized alphabetically by title, of all things.
I don’t mean to suggest that the organization of a director’s output in the alternative video market is the best measure of his or her current stature. At the same
time, these markets do shape, and are shaped by, the public perception of a director’s
oeuvre. Considered in this light, the fall of George A. Romero is as dramatic as the
rise of David Cronenberg.
I have chosen to focus on these two directors as much for their early similarities as for their inverted career trajectories since the 1980s. Both rose to prominence
around the same time—Romero somewhat earlier with the big splash (or splatter)
of Night, though it was a relationship with the genre he would not consolidate until
a decade later. Both were credited with revitalizing, and even reinventing, horror in
the 1970s and early 1980s. Both were viewed as mavericks, independents working
outside the Hollywood system and against the genre grain. And both were dubbed
auteurs in the same year, 1979: Romero by Film Comment, and Cronenberg, in a
telling double negative (“Cronenberg is nothing if not an auteur”), by Robin Wood.
But where Cronenberg rose to increasing international prominence after The Fly
(1986), Romero’s own interaction with the studios was less than genial, and by the
midnineties he had largely stopped working, making only one, undistributed film in
the years between The Dark Half (1993) and Land of the Dead (2005). I would argue,
however, that their popular/critical divergence—and Romero’s recent return—has
less to do with the success or failure of each director’s encounter with the studios
than with the evolution of the genre, perceptions of each director’s relationship to
the genre, and the interplay between the genre and history.
Contemporary media have given directors a greater opportunity than ever
before to become the custodians of their legacy, and David Cronenberg has been
particularly canny in this regard. The auteur mystique that surrounds him—the fact
that every next movie is anticipated as a “Cronenberg movie”—is partly indebted
to this. Even though Cronenberg’s cinematic identity was forged through his early
horror films, it has become paradoxically more reified as he has distanced himself
from the genre—a paradox which Cronenberg himself has expressed through the
figure of the outsider in disguise. In this sense, A History of Violence (2005) might be
Cronenberg’s most “Cronenberg movie” to date: the self-made Tom Stall, a monster
hidden in the mainstream, is perhaps the clearest analogue to the director of any of

his protagonists; and the film’s interrogation of the American myth of self-making
takes on the subsidiary role of interrogating Cronenberg’s identity as an auteur. Violence can be read as a desperate attempt and ultimate failure to assert the integrity of
identity (human, artistic) against the fragmented/fragmenting conditions of authorship; and it is this despair and longing that resonate with the audience’s nostalgia
for the lost integrity of the patriarch, both familial and cinematic. To a somewhat
lesser extent Romero has also participated in fashioning his own cinematic image,
in this case as a small businessman, political progressive, and movie-lover—which
goes a long way toward explaining, together with the persistent bugbear of modest
box office, his retreat from cinema for much of the 1990s. But I am more interested
in exploring the way in which the road back to the Dead series was paved by the
confluence of two forces: the sharpening of the historical moment on the one hand,
and the recent spate of Romero-inspired zombie films on the other. Together, they
have given Romero the opportunity to make a “cinematic comic book” that is at
the same time a political weapon—albeit a characteristically ambivalent one, where
nostalgia for a kinder, gentler capitalism masquerades as revolution, and where the
leap forward from a genre mired in parody is legitimized by a step backward to
social-allegorical tradition. Overall, while Cronenberg’s movies have come to exhibit
that staid minimalism we expect from a “mature” director of international stature,
Romero’s latest marks just the opposite: a joyful yet dour return to the exuberance
of his genre’s g(l)ory days.

T h e S e l f - Fa s h i o n i n g o f Dav i d C r o n e n b e r g ( a n d To m S ta l l )
It used to be a running gag uniting the hundreds of interviews with David
Cronenberg: He looks different from what I expected. Even as late as 1999 the critical establishment seemed unprepared to confront the director in person. Its envoys
would arrive loaded down with silver bullets and crucifixes and holy water. Didn’t
they know that these fetishes descend from the very gothic tradition from which the
director had worked to distance himself? And when they found instead a “college
professor type” (Blackwelder), or a “dental student” (Rodley xiii), or, most famously,
“a gynecologist from Beverly Hills” (Scorsese 47), did they imagine they heard, in
that Canadian accent, a hint of Lugosi?
If the gag still seems fresh, maybe Cronenberg has something to do with it.
He is hardly averse to identifying himself with his films, even as he maintains that
the work of art may not be revealing about its creator at all (Grünberg 26; Rodley
152). Art, he argues, is “of you, but it’s not you. It’s not identical with you” (Grünberg 148). To a point, Cronenberg just wants to dissuade critics from looking to
crude autobiography for answers—as Grünberg does, ironically enough, when

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he mythologizes the director as “a monster . . . born from [the] hypocritical selfrestraint and . . . repressive social consensus [of Puritan Toronto]” (10). But if the
“monster born from repression” formula is hardly adequate to describe the director or his work, the figure of Cronenberg-as-monster resonates beyond Grünberg,
echoing the title of William Beard’s ever-expanding study. It is not this monster
that interests me, however, so much as another “monster,” born of the tensions
between and within two interpretative economies, genre and auteur, which alternately disguise and reveal each other, and between and against which the director
attempts to fashion himself.
Cronenberg’s rise to critical and (less consistently) commercial prominence can
be understood in light of metamorphoses in both his oeuvre and his directorial persona: from cult horror-movie director to maker of arthouse-cum-mainstream films
(Beard 471; Lowenstein 166). Such metamorphoses, however, imply continuities
against which the director’s “evolution” or “progression” can be measured (Blackwelder; Rodley xix). For Adam Lowenstein, for example, Cronenberg has evolved
from art-inflected horror to horror-inflected art; but all the director’s films inhabit
a generic between-space where the untenable distinctions between genre and “art”
cinema are revealed.4 Like Lowenstein, Jonathan Crane argues that Cronenberg’s
later films retain elements of horror, but locates the early films’ generic impurity in
their affinity with science-fiction—not to attempt to “claim” early Cronenberg as
sci-fi, but to note that the early films drew from both generic discourses to produce
a hybrid Crane calls “science embodied” (65). And Cronenberg himself famously
described The Brood as his version of Kramer Vs. Kramer, or family melodrama
reconfigured as horror (Scorsese 47).
From his earliest days as a commercial filmmaker, then, Cronenberg has troubled the idea of genre as a pure, stable category; even horror, his mother-genre, had
to be remade from the outside. From horror ’zines to academic journals, Cronenberg has repeated the same story: that he has “never been a genre buff ” (Porton
8), that he “didn’t think of [him]self as genre-specific” (9), and that he only began
making horror films because the genre seemed like “a natural fit” (9) for his thematic
preoccupations. The darker aspects of human nature and society that Cronenberg
treats—aging, media control, disease—have always brought his films within the
orbit of the genre; but it was the literalizing of these in the grotesque body that once
earned him the label of “Canada’s King of Horror.” (This is why the word “literally”
occurs perhaps more than any other in criticism of Cronenberg’s early films.) Conversely, it is almost entirely on the basis of the absence of the grotesque body that his
departure from the genre has been judged. As Beard so aptly put it in his first filmby-film treatment of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, “the moment Max [Renn]’s slit appears
. . . it is a Cronenberg movie, and there is no going back” (“Mind” 66). The neardisappearance of the monstrous body has left critics to wrestle for the few crumbs

of grotesquerie Cronenberg’s early style has left behind, as when, in the most recent
edition of The Artist as Monster, Beard lovingly describes Yvonne’s teeth in Spider as
“prominent, yellowish, [and] gapped” (488).
Cronenberg’s propensity to generic hybridity, however, also needs to be measured against shifts in genre and cinema since he began making commercial films.
Crane, for example, has argued that the horror genre’s “system-wide collapse into
parody” (63) in the 1990s was incompatible with the director’s tragic vision. And
what Crane says of horror in the nineties, critics like Robin Wood have extended
to commercial cinema as a whole. For Wood, “hybridity” is too strong a term
to describe the flattened cinematic landscape of today, where genre cinema has
become “self-conscious pastiche” and Hollywood’s efforts more and more homogenized (Hollywood xxxv). In such a transformed landscape, the horror film has
either become more openly parasitical upon tropes that were once alien to it (and
vice-versa), or has self-consciously gazed backward to a perhaps imagined time of
greater generic stability.5
It would be logical to assume that the bleeding out of the violence of Cronenberg and other “body horror” directors’ films into cinema as a whole, coupled with
the decrement of the grotesque body in Cronenberg’s own films, would have weakened the director’s cinematic identity. Paradoxically, just the opposite is true. Beard,
whose last edition of The Artist as Monster runs to almost six hundred (wonderful)
pages, has as little difficulty telling us what makes “a Cronenberg film” in 2006 as he
did in 1983, with or without stomach slits. (And he is by no means alone; the title of
J. Hoberman’s review of Eastern Promises in the Village Voice: “Still Cronenberg.”) In
a 1999 Cineaste interview, Cronenberg explained his early involvement with horror
in classical Hollywood terms: the genre helped him to pass off his grim, abstract
meditations about mortality in the commercial arena—something his late respectability has allowed him to do without the fetters of genre. Purified of the “generic”
elements of his filmmaking identity, his true cinematic personality has been allowed
to blossom; he has been left a sort of transcendent, self-referential being, his oeuvre a genre unto itself, as every good auteur desires it to be (Rodley 59). As such,
Cronenberg doesn’t “do” genre pictures anymore—he would argue that he never
really did. Cronenberg does Cronenberg pictures.
And yet, while Cronenberg claims that leaving behind the trappings of horror
has given him the opportunity to express himself more directly, he has done so ever
more in disguise. Cronenberg articulated this paradox as early as 1982, when he was
on the cusp of domestic recognition for Videodrome and only a few, albeit frustrating,
years away from commercial Hollywood success with The Fly: “The more accepted
you become in your society and the more a part of the establishment you become,”
Cronenberg said to Piers Handling and William Beard, “the more tenuous your grip
on your ‘insideness’ becomes”; and, in response to their surprised follow-up: “I am

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[still an outsider]. I’m just much more in disguise” (195). True to his words, as his
international reputation has grown over the last two decades, with the attendant
bigger budgets and gigs on film juries that such respectability bestow, his image as
a maverick seems to have grown in direct proportion. This is not just the phenomenon of the enfant terrible, of celebrated notoriety. As Cronenberg phrases it, the
more fully he embraces mainstream, genre, and America, the more completely he
remains a maverick Canadian independent; and the more “unoriginal” he appears to
be, the more his true originality is confirmed. Hence the odd double-move that has
characterized Cronenberg’s evolution “away” from horror: toward self-revelation on
the one hand, and toward yet-greater disguise on the other.
As the foregoing suggests, Cronenberg’s aura as arch-auteur is as much proactive self-invention as it is a retrospective construct of critical analysis (Wollen 602).
Indeed, he has grasped better than most of his colleagues the way in which a director can participate in fashioning the public mirror in which he wishes to be viewed.
If there is, as Robin Wood once wrote, “a dislocation between the intellectual pretensions (what [Cronenberg’s] films say they are about) and the repulsive and obsessional imagery (what they actually do)” (“Dissenting” 134), I would argue that this
dislocation is at least partly a product of Cronenberg’s own eagerness to say what his
films are about. Cronenberg becomes the central text for interpreting “Cronenberg,”
to the point that the critic is occasionally unsure whether he is responding to the
work or the man, so thoroughly is our perception of his oeuvre shaped by his presence. Lowenstein may be right that Cronenberg is parodying this auteur mystique
by “appearing” as a disembodied voice in Crash (171); but if so, he is doing it as the
purest self-parody, in full knowledge of the way he has himself participated in its
construction.
Key to the creation of the Cronenberg mystique—his cinematic “I am that I
am”—is the denial of any cinematic influences (e.g., Rodley 23, 72).6 Cronenberg is
less loath to admit philosophical and literary influences; but even here he resorts
to biological and other, more monstrous metaphors, such as fusion, ingestion, and
parallel evolution (Browning 39, 53; Rodley 153; Grünberg 127). Their loosely scientific air, however, does not hinder the director from investing his conception of
influence with quasi-metaphysical heft, as when he speaks of “becoming” Hemingway (Breskin 69), or Burroughs “writing” Naked Lunch (Browning 39). In this way,
his literary precursors become less influences than equals, or doubles; Cronenberg,
like Burroughs, becomes an original creative artist in his own right (cf. Beard, Monster 540).
In this way, Cronenberg’s mid-1980s turn to adaptation and revision is easily recuperable within his purported creative economy. This has little to do with
the less-mined vein of auteur theory which dictates that, by being thrown back on
pure cinema, Cronenberg became a true artist, the screenplays just “catalysts” for

his unique vision (Wollen 600). Rather, it is because Cronenberg retains, or has
claimed that he retains, a strong writerly presence in many of his later films. Beard,
for example, reminds us that Naked Lunch is only nominally an adaptation, and that
Dead Ringers bears little resemblance to the original.7 But Dead Ringers was also a
collaborative adaptation, one which Cronenberg claims was so effective a fusion that
he no longer fully remembers who wrote what (Bloch-Hansen 55). What’s more,
fusion quickly shades into ingestion. For Cronenberg is also quick to emphasize the
director’s preeminent role in deciding every aspect of the film, from script to score to
special effects (Garris, “3” 26; Timpone 21). Like his literary influences, the director
appears to “consume” the filmmaking apparatus as well, from the scriptwriter down
to the best boy. Every frame teems with his vision. It is just such a mystique Beard
invokes when he asserts even adaptations like M Butterfly and Crash exhibit the
director’s “150-proof authorial presence” (424).
A few reactions to The Dead Zone may help illustrate how Cronenberg’s turn
to adaptation and more “mainstream” filmmaking can be recuperated through the
concept of the auteur-in-disguise. The film was praised by writer Philip Nutman
because the director had “managed to impose his own vision to such a degree that
the end result is undeniably a Cronenberg film” (172); by Serge Grünberg for “really
[being] a Cronenberg film,” to the point that the script “doesn’t feel [. . .] Stephen
King-inspired” (77); by Robin Wood because it had “released [Cronenberg] from
his constricting personal obsessions” (“Nightmares” 115)—that is, those that qualified him as an auteur; and by George Romero because the director had effaced himself, thus allowing the film to remain a faithful translation of King’s novel (Gagne
123). Such contrary opinions could only be arrived at if these critics and filmmakers
had a very clear idea of what a “Cronenberg movie” does or does not look like [. . .]
yet none of them could agree about what that means. This seems the essence of the
Cronenberg paradox, and perhaps also speaks to the mystique of the auteur more
broadly: as soon as the director’s name is stamped on a film, normality can always
be perceived as transgression in disguise, absence construed as directorial presence.
But Cronenberg’s own words on the film are, as usual, the most revealing. Admitting some anxiety about the turn from writing to adaptation, Cronenberg reassured
himself, “I had to assume that through the accumulation of thousands and thousands of details that go into making a film, I would be there” (Rodley 113). Like
Yvonne’s teeth in Spider—and God, and the Devil—the auteur is in the details, at
once the transcendent presence behind the film and atomized in its every frame, an
accumulation of material facts that becomes, by some miracle of alchemy or critical
theory, a coherent whole.
Ironically, another example of Cronenbergian disavowal of influence is the
director’s constant reference to his “Canadianness,” where Canada exists only as an
absence—not just the absence of explicitly Canadian settings within the films (Knee

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34), but the absence of any coherent national framework for reading them. There
is something perverse about positing “Canadianness” as a shared, public frame of
reference, and then withdrawing it in the same stroke by claiming “Canadian” means
that the proper, indeed the only, frame of reference is the private one of the filmmaker-artist. Even autobiography is withdrawn from its public, historical context,
since the director reveals that his family invented their own version of what it meant
to be middle-class Jews in Toronto (Rodley 3). Like “Canada,” they seemed to have
provided the budding artist with an environment in which self-making was possible
and legitimate.
Jim Leach has noted that Cronenberg emphasizes his Canadianness in part
by calling himself an “exile from American culture” (482). But the Canadian is only
the vehicle here; the tenor, once again, is the idea of Cronenberg-as-outsider—not
just the Canadian as outside America, but the independent filmmaker as exile from
Hollywood. Beard has noted the importance of the outsider trope to Cronenberg’s
perception of himself as “a kind of romantic hero who must brave the depths of
the unconscious” (Monster ix). Cronenberg is the outcast, the derelict who, in the
later films, resolves into the figure of the artist (xi), and who remarked to Grünberg, “Spider, c’est moi” (qtd. in Beard 490). He is the one whose dangerous ideas
have been “censored” and “banned” by ideologues and governments on both ends
of the political spectrum (Porton 5)—this because his films are as devoid of historical and ideological influences as cinematic ones; because they “go back to the
voice that spoke before all these [social, ideological] structures were imposed on it”
(Rodley 158). Cronenberg is—if we are to take his arguments for the meanings of
his films seriously—a much-misunderstood, much-maligned figure. We may not
go as far as Martin Scorsese once did, saying that Cronenberg “has no idea what
his films are about”; but there is some justice to this, given how many critics have
contested Cronenberg’s stated intentions about his representations of technology
and sexuality, and their relationship to human liberation and identity creation.8
Conversely, many of Cronenberg’s apologists seem to swallow whole the director’s
pronouncements about his films, to the point that he appears the mythic obverse of
Robin Wood’s early caricature: a champion of artistic and sexual freedom, enemy
of dogma, theory, and ideology (Rodley xxiv). What his apologists and detractors
alike seem to miss is the importance of misapprehension to the Cronenberg mystique. Taken together, the director’s feeling that his films are both transgressive and
misunderstood only further reinforces his aura of otherness.
Cronenberg has more than once invited comparison between himself and his
heroic but myopic father figure-scientists, like Raglan in The Brood (Chute 42). But
in his connection to Raglan, I would stress the myopic as much as the heroic. For
if Cronenberg is Raglan, then his texts are Nola Carveth; and it is their dangerous generativity—their ability to self-augment, to create new meanings without the

intervention of their father-author—that Cronenberg appears to resent. The director also compares himself to Nola: the films are children of his own rage, projections
of his own unconscious. It is a telling wish, and not just for the idea of parthenogenesis, which speaks so clearly to Cronenberg’s desire for total originality. For what
defines the brood, according to the film, is their identity with their mother; as mere
embodiments of her repressed wishes, they expire when those wishes are fulfilled.
Thus, even as Cronenberg acknowledges that a film “has a life of its own that [. . .]
go[es] beyond what you consciously planned” (Garris, “2” 27), the emphasis is not
on the brood as a figure for textual indeterminacy and free-play, but an invitation to
the audience to decipher their father-creator’s unconscious.
The simultaneous desire for misapprehension and unitary meaning helps
explain Cronenberg’s long-standing ambivalence about horror: the genre appears as
both a monstrous mother in whose grotesque body he can hide, and hide his audience from, “the terrible truth,” and as a cinema capable of confronting that “only fact
of human existence,” the body (Rodley 158, 59; Porton 9). The genre thus figures the
double-move between revelation and disguise. The dark corners and stripped veneer
and other shoddy gothic imagery with which Cronenberg clutters his musings on
Truth are themselves but metaphors of unmasking; the films’ “proximity to [. . .]
our unconscious” (46) Grünberg praises is but censorship by another name; there is
no “literally.” For this reason Cronenberg can never definitively leave the genre and
appear “as himself,” tear through the monstrous veil to reveal the Ding an sich. Like
horror, the “global cinematic artist” is but another veil hiding a monster.9 Cronenberg’s career is thus less a descent toward some great and final unmasking than a
pageant, a horizontal movement between masks, or masks within masks: monsters
disguising monsters.
Cronenberg once wore the mask of horror, the outsider genre, to disguise and
protect the outsider within. Today, horror itself has become something monstrous
to the director, a reminder of an “old” self hidden under the mask of international
recognition. Cronenberg claims he reacts with “horror” to his old movies (Grünberg
48), and of himself as a young man, he remarks, “I’m a completely different creature” (Grünberg 94).10 In good gothic fashion, the new and improved Cronenberg
is haunted by the specter of his monstrous past. But the monster here isn’t only the
younger self as gothic Other whose repression predicates its inevitable return; it is
also the composite body of the auteur who, at the same time that he asserts his radical difference from himself, insists that these previous incarnations can be assembled into a coherent whole. The entomological metaphors Cronenberg employs to
describe aging (Grünberg 94) are also a fitting evocation of the tension between
sameness and difference that characterizes artistic growth. If each film sloughs off
the previous to become something wholly new, to what extent can it be understood
as a fragment of an overarching vision? To what extent is the pupa, the butterfly,

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the maggot the fly? Cronenberg wishes to be both the consistent controlling presence impersonating a series of cinematic selves, and to be each of those selves, to
make himself anew with each film. His dilemma, then, is to assemble a coherent
identity from ostensibly heterogeneous incarnations which threaten to fragment his
cinematic body to such an extent that the “hidden” auteur is never quite able to unify
it—except, perhaps, as a monster. This is why, even as Cronenberg’s films revel in
fragmentation, they seem deeply nostalgic for truth, wholeness, and the romantic
auteur: that missing piece, the Piece of pieces, held by the protagonist, the director’s
stand-in, like that bloody shard of glass up Spider’s sleeve.
A History of Violence is remarkable for the way it puts so many of the aforementioned features of Cronenberg’s career—generic hybridity, disguise, and selfauthorship—into play. A sort of obverse Long Kiss Goodnight or True Lies, Violence’s generic inheritance is complex even for Cronenberg; critics have inventoried
elements of film noir, road movie, at least two distinct Western subgenres, “serious
art film meditation,” and “it-came-from-within horror” (Taubin 26; Fuller 13; Lim).
All of these come wrapped up inside the “mainstream adult thriller” Violence was
marketed as, and which certainly describes its origin: a 32-million-dollar studio
vehicle which Cronenberg initially took on as a sort of hired gun (Taubin 26). A
History of Violence was perceived by critics to work on two levels: genre thriller
and—what else?—“Cronenberg movie.” A mass, “Red State” audience might be
fooled into believing that this was an action flick about defending family values
against evildoers; but those of us who know it’s Cronenberg see a different film. In
this regard, Violence is really the director’s apotheosis: Cronenberg, the outsiderin-disguise, has hidden a dark message inside the candy coating of a big-budget
Hollywood thriller—a film that is itself about a man who disguises his darkness
from the American mainstream, and about a country that hides its darkness from
itself. It is the clearest allegory of Cronenberg’s perception of his role as an artist—
clearer, I think, than Spider; Cronenberg could just as appropriately have said, “Joey,
c’est moi.” Violence is thus at once Cronenberg’s most American film—in big budget,
comic book origin, and setting—and, precisely because of this, his most transgressive: the Canadian “outsider” tearing through the mythic veil of Middle America;
the monster invited to sit down to dinner.
Critics such as Philip Nutman and Tim Lucas argue that the family has been
an “abiding concern” of Cronenberg’s cinema. But A History of Violence and Spider
are his most explicit treatments of the family since The Brood—with the difference
that Violence examines the social construction of the American family. Of course,
there are two families here: Tom Stall’s, the nuclear family of Midwestern American
myth; and Joey Cusack’s, “The Family” of the Eastern mafia, as mythologically and
cinematically American as the former. The latter is the former’s shadow, a parody
of Tom’s plain domestic happiness . . . or perhaps just the opposite is true. (“Home

sweet home,” Ruben says of Richie’s mansion when he and Joey arrive together.)
Essential to the latter, too, is not just the mythic violence of the gangster, but the
extended patriarchal family that operates as an economic unit.11 The nuclear family
may have supplanted the patriarchal clan, but The Family remains its unacknowledged residue—and it remains thus in the contested figure of the father. For the
father, who runs the family business, is the end product of the primitive accumulation of those earlier fathers, of the force and fraud of countless generations of
fathers who enabled Tom, for all his Christ-like “going into the desert” to “kill Joey,”
to become a small-business owner. Tom Stall may be the essence of the self-made
man—not just the businessman, but the one who existentially remakes himself,
who pulls his identity “up by his bootstraps”—but all self-made men were “made”
men first, as sure as Jay Gatsby was. As mafia don Carl Fogarty remarks when he
tries to give Tom a one-hundred-dollar bill, “It shouldn’t be any problem for you.”
Like America historically, Tom/Joey’s impossible task is to separate The Family
from the family, the made from the self-made, by violently suppressing the former.
His inability to do so threatens to tear his family apart, since it reveals the violence
at the origin of family making, and indeed of identity making.
Ironically, self-made Tom Stall probably couldn’t survive without his wife’s
income; Violence’s opening gives us the impression that Stall’s Diner is slow on a
good day. But if Edie supports Tom financially, Tom performs a much more important function for Edie: he sustains her belief in mythic America. Edie comes across
as a hard-nosed realist and modern; Tom, by contrast, is a throwback to an older
America. He pines for drive-ins, of all things. Tom is too American, in the same way
his son is too much the wimp, the school bully too much the bully. Edie loves Tom
Stall because he is an American icon. And Edie, too, is perfectly willing to transform
herself into an American myth (cheerleader, high school sweetheart) to seduce her
mythic husband.
Or does Edie love Joey Cusack, the mythically violent gangster with whom she
has violent sex on the Stalls’ stairs? We might ask the same question of the town of
Millbrook. For it is Tom’s classic American heroism—his unbridled violence—that
brings Millbrook out to applaud. Not Tom Stall, but Joey, the made man, brings in
the clientèle . . . and Edie, too. Violence is good for business; it makes people nostalgic for that old America, which Tom sells by the cup (“It really is very good coffee,
Joey . . .”). As for Edie, she will begin to role-play just like her husband—will come
to recognize that role-playing has always been the stuff of family life, as ridiculous
as the grown-up cheerleader who seduces “Tom Stall.”
Joey may be an artist of violence, but like Cronenberg, his chief artistic act is
self-creation: Tom Stall is a work of art. Yet, as Beard has noted about the existential
drama that forms the heart of Cronenberg’s films, Violence’s attempt at self-creation
fails: the hero’s “fragile ego” disintegrates over the course of the film; the exposure

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of his act of self-creation makes it unclear whether it can be sustained; and Edie’s
learning the truth about Tom’s past leaves the couple alienated from each other and
from themselves. Richie Cusack may momentarily represent what is disavowed for
the purpose of catharsis in the combat between “bad” and “good” brothers à la Scanners; but the ridiculous ease with which Tom dispatches him and his idiot crew
suggests only more disavowal. It is significant that Richie is fumbling with his keys,
locked out of his “nice” house, when Joey opens the door and puts a bullet through
his head. The true owner has arrived: Richie is as much an intruder as were the “bad
men” on Tom Stall’s front lawn, and Joey/Tom is finally really living the American
dream. For all the iconicity of Tom’s Marathon Man-esque throwing of his gun into
the water and washing himself at the end of the film (in Richie’s pond, no less), the
Stalls are in no way now safe to continue living their fiction. Knowledge that it is a
fiction has undermined them. The “bad men” (and women) are not in the East, but
in the kitchen, sitting around the family table.12
Violence’s ending is also remarkable from the perspective of the genre in which
the film purports to be working. One of the chief tropes of the action thriller, for
example, is that of the male hero who, moments after brutally killing scores of bad
men, returns home to his family with light step and beaming smile. Tom’s homecoming is anything but this. The Monster has sat down to dinner, and, for all the
world, we can still see the blood on that ever-more-ridiculous flannel shirt. He looks
haunted; his wife and son seem embarrassed, or terrified. But dinner is served, so
what can anyone do except pass the potatoes? The discourse of horror similarly
undermines the mainstream thriller by forcing the audience to question their
“complicit[y] in the exhilaration” of the film’s violence (Cronenberg, qtd. in Lim).
The few moments of grotesquerie—mainly shots of wounded bodies—are there
to remind us of the end product of Joey Cusack’s brutality. If these scenes are not
“unshowable” in the early Cronenberg sense, or “unfilmable” like the novels of Ballard and Burroughs, they are unshowable in another way: excluded by the conventions of the genre. They are the missing scenes from any Hollywood action-thriller,
where the hero’s violence is sanitized and the villain’s is fawned upon. In Violence,
villain and hero are one. Thus the film’s grotesques are not narcissistic self-reference,
bones thrown to the old horror crowd. Rather, Cronenberg’s horror legacy allows
him to manifest the repressed content not just of a psyche, but a genre—which is
the American psyche writ large. Once again, Cronenberg is the monster unleashed
upon mainstream Hollywood, tearing through the mythic veil of convention to
expose the mythic violence behind.
In Tom/Joey, Cronenberg finds a linchpin between the American obsession
with self-making and his own. Ironically, in undermining America’s chief myth, he
similarly undermines the attempts at independent self-fashioning that have characterized his career. With Violence Cronenberg reveals that self-making is itself a

violent act, one that requires the violent suppression of the past and its violent substitution by a present. For if Joey was violent, Tom’s attempts to keep his past at bay
are similarly violent, and the film’s escalating violence reflects his increasing failure
to do so. This is the ambiguity that Andrew Britton identified in the figure of the
monster between the return of the repressed and the return of repression (41). Such
a troubling irresolution is a signature of Cronenberg’s cinema, its paradoxical claim
to unity: problem and solution, liberation and repression, “are more intimately connected than radically opposed” (Lowenstein 157). As such the Cronenbergian “gothic”
neither reinforces traditional binaries nor offers a progressive alternative. Beard has
commented that Cronenberg’s heroes can find no happy medium between release
and repression. By suggesting that release and repression are indistinguishable in
their violence, Violence explains why this is so. For if the entire economy of repression/release is meaningless in Violence’s universe, and perhaps in Cronenberg’s as
well, how can there possibly be “a road to health and wholeness”?

G e o r g e A. R o m e r o’s C e l e st i a l C i t y o f t h e D e a d
The earliest adult photo of David Cronenberg I encountered (on page 165
of The Shape of Rage) shows the director with shoulder-length hair shooting the
short “From the Drain” at the University of Toronto. Stuffed with actor, assistant,
light, and camera into a tiny bathroom, the picture expresses the sort of cramped
intimacy I have always associated with art-film circles. The earliest photo I know
of George A. Romero is the one on page 10 of Paul Gagne’s The Zombies That Ate
Pittsburgh. Described as “an early publicity photo for Latent Image,” it shows a cleanshaven young man in a turtleneck and blazer poised before a movie camera and
holding an open script in his hand. The calm expression belies nothing of that hunger to make a feature film which Romero has since said characterized his emotions
at that time. But in a broader sense, it was the sole purpose of this little artifact
of self-promotion: Latent Image’s work shootingtelevision commercials was to be
Romero’s foot in the door.13 Although these two photos were taken under totally
different circumstances, they express a foundational difference in the identities of
these two filmmakers. True, both went to college in the heady sixties, and Cronenberg, too, describes that hunger to make a commercial feature. But Romero’s roots
in advertising, and the formation of Latent Image in the mid-1960s—his immediate
introduction into the business of filmmaking—could not be more different from
Cronenberg’s origins in Toronto’s art film underground, or, for that matter, his later
soliciting of government money to make his first commercial feature.
If Cronenberg has always insisted on being called an artist, his films art, Romero
has preferred less lofty terms: entertainment, comic books, “penny dreadfuls.” His

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is the more traditional story of the budding horror filmmaker in terms of his early
exposure to the genre and to genre cinema (Gagne 8, 11). And despite occasionally
feeling trapped by the genre label, be it by contractual stipulations or poor box office
returns (Gagne 119, 169), Romero has declared an affinity for horror—and for genre
filmmaking, and for filmmaking per se—that Cronenberg never has. Romero seems
to have reconciled himself to his eternal return to horror with the same boyish
enthusiasm he holds for filmmaking more broadly: that tinkerer’s appeal to movies
as a craft that we associate with Romero’s films even today, and that I would argue
distinguishes his visual style from Cronenberg’s as well.
That said, Romero’s cinematic persona is not without its own ambivalences and
contradictions. In his own efforts at self-fashioning, he has tended to foreground his
identity as a small businessman and political progressive. These are the two heads
of the axe he has always had to grind about Hollywood. He has never claimed to
have any illusions about how the big studios operate, or what their real interests are;
corporations, like zombies, act according to their natures. He has only declared the
wish that there were more alternatives for independents (Gagne 59–60). Nor has he
ever expressed a conflict with the idea of profit—he is, after all, a businessman—so
long as profits are small and tidy; again, it’s the big boys and their blockbusters that
have ruined the chances for independents to work and thrive (Gagne 59–60). From
Hollywood, Romero’s kvetch easily extends to contemporary America: the withering of cities, the planned obsolescence of new construction, the death of American
industry and the middle-class wage (Gagne 74–75, 159).
As a businessman, then, when Romero kvetches about “the system,” he does
so with a greater or lesser degree of ambivalence.14 One gets the impression that
Romero can never quite reconcile the dissonance between the way the system is
supposed to operate and the way it does. On one end of the spectrum is the Romero
who is nostalgic for a saner, more ethical capitalism that purportedly allowed the
small, independent producer to make his “tidy profits,” the laborer his middleclass wage, and each to go home to his bourgeois family. On the other end is the
Romero with the (understandable) desire to overthrow a “bullshit” system that
screwed him out of his money for Night of the Living Dead, forced him to spend
the next decade crawling out of the red rather than declaring bankruptcy (again:
sanity, ethics), jacked every movie he released (thanks to the summer blockbuster,
the problems of small distributors, the illegal purchase of the Dead franchise, etc.),
and finally throttled his artistic independence. This is the Romero who has suffered a complete loss of faith in American capitalism and experiences a Woodian “savage joy” at the system’s ultimate unsalvagability. His films tend to oscillate between these two extremes. The clearest expressions of the latter—creative
tantrums of a sort over a system that doesn’t work the way it’s “supposed” to—are
those in the Dead series.

Wood has expressed disappointment with all of Romero’s films outside the
Dead series, and clearly considers the latter to be the truest and most successful
reflection of Romero’s political temperament. Romero himself seems to corroborate
this in interviews, although the syntax is ambiguous: when Romero says the series
is the place where he “can show most how [he] see[s] the world” (qtd. in D’AgnoloVallan 23), he could be speaking less about the particular content of the message
than the legibility of the form in which he works. It is difficult to imagine that
Knightriders or Martin, which Romero has singled out as his favorite and most
personal films, represent any less Romero’s “real” perspective. Romero is a brilliant
satirist of contemporary capitalism and patriarchy; but to argue that he writes and
directs without a degree of ambivalence about the so-called American way is, I
think, to caricature his oeuvre. More than Cronenberg, Romero is a contemporary
Melville—one who, as Hawthorne once said of him, “can neither believe, nor be
comfortable in his unbelief ” (“Melville”). Hawthorne’s ostensible subject was religion, but it could just as easily have been the American religion of free enterprise.
Wood might criticize Knightriders for being “the archetypal liberal American movie”
(Hollywood 168); but it is difficult not to conclude that Romero is the archetypal
liberal American director, torn, as Bob Martin once figured it, between King Billy,
the uncompromising idealist, and Morgan, “pleased by the cheers of the crowd, the
rewards of a good business deal, and perhaps even a bit tempted by the glitter and
gaudiness of show-business success” (“Knightriders” 66).
Romero’s image as a maverick is a product of the mystique that developed
around his refusal to work in Hollywood. As such, Romero’s cinematic persona is
inextricably tied to his identity as an independent businessman, and his legend and
legacy are due as much to the success of Laurel, the company he founded with Richard Rubinstein in 1973, as to his films. The financial vicissitudes of being an independent in an age of conglomerates—digging up investors, deferring payments, and
all the other seat-of-your-pants solutions independents find to get films made—
certainly account for the themes that have obsessed Romero throughout his career:
his quixotic exuberance for tilting at the windmills of corporate power (a trope best
represented by Billy in Knightriders, but also by the hodgepodge of radicals and
androgynes scattered throughout his films); and its obverse, the emptiness, greed,
and oppression that characterize traditional authority (the military in The Crazies,
Cuda of Martin, Rhodes in Day, Knightriders’ fat cop, and so on). The tendency to
frame his narratives in these terms also accounts for the propensity to read Romero’s films as allegories both of the general struggle of the disenfranchised against
consolidated economic power, and the specific struggle of the independent artist
against the Hollywood behemoth. The clear allegorical bent of the individual films
has also invited critics like Tom Allen to read the director’s career as a meta-allegory,
a “cautionary tale” about “what it takes for an independent to survive in an industry

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dominated by the Hollywood studio system” (xi). Romero is thus a sort of saint,
whose life, like his work, points to an obvious moral. In this regard, his absence from
cinema throughout most of the 1990s is an artistic statement in itself.
Romero claims that he did not begin his career as a conscious allegorist, and
has expressed surprise at critics’ willingness to read messages into Night of the Living Dead, generally attributing the meanings that did “creep in” to the historical
moment: “It was 1968, man. Everybody had a ‘message’” (Gagne 38). But the response
to Night seems to have made Romero more conscious of the symbolic power of
the zombie. By Dawn, Romero had a clear grasp of both the zombie’s traditional
significance and the way it could be put to work for social allegory; as he told Dan
Yakir the year after Dawn’s release, he liked zombies because of their class identity
as workers: they were the ones who “went out to pick the sugar cane” while “Lugosi
lived in a castle” (60). Tellingly, in the same interview Romero also revealed that
the seed of his scripts was the message, or “underbelly,”15 claiming that “the surface
doesn’t matter.” “Fantasy,” he observed, “has always been used as parable, as sociopolitical criticism” (61). Shortly after, Romero seems to have about-faced again, to
his earlier position that the message was largely unconscious (Hollywood 115); and
by the time of Gagne’s chronicle he was arguing that the desire for the film to have
social significance could “interfere” with its “comic-book surface” (Gagne 38). In his
most recent interviews, Romero has continued to play both sides: he has taken to
calling the “message” of Dawn “too precious,” suggesting again that underbelly had
trumped surface (qtd. in Lee 68); on the other hand, he couldn’t “pitch” the idea for
Land because it was just an idea, about “people ignoring the problem in a post-9/11
world” (Curnutte).
My purpose here is not to “catch Romero out” by comparing statements he has
made about the Dead films at different points in his career. Rather, I want to suggest that, as about business, he has always expressed a certain ambivalence about
allegory, that tension between surface and depth, comic book horror film and sociopolitical message, the latter of which Romero has consistently referred to as their
underbelly: a perfect, visceral term; a message written in gore. Since Dawn, critics have tended to look at the zombie films as all of an allegorical piece. But such
a foreshortened perspective on the series tends to distort the individual films by
seeing the earlier installments only in light of later ones, obscuring a crucial difference: that Romero has become more concerned with the “message,” the Dead films
more “belly,” with each installment (Pinewood interview). That Night was understood in a variety of political contexts does not mean that critics expected Dawn
to carry a “message.” Only after Dawn had been digested as a satire of consumerism
(and this certainly wasn’t true for all critics, many of whom still saw it only as an
ultraviolent horror film) did audiences come to expect a moment-specific “message”
from the third Dead film. Ironically, Day was dogged by critics for being overly talky

and philosophical, and I would speculate that Romero’s comments in 1986 about
the dangers of sacrificing surface to message were a response to Day’s trouncing by
critics. But while the crew of Day referred to that film as “Zombies in the White
House,” even Day was not greeted with the sort of “what-will-Romero-have-to-sayabout-Bush?” fanfare that Land was. Indeed, it would have been inconceivable for
Day to be received with comments like “Land of the Dead will speak volumes to
John Stewart’s fan base” (D’Agnolo-Vallan 24), or to be included off the bat in a
Village Voice article about films that respond to the “war on terror” ( J. Hoberman’s
“Unquiet Americans”). Thus, Land reflects anything but a chastened Romero. Like
Christian in A Pilgrim’s Progress, Romero appears to have reached his allegorical
apotheosis, a place of equipoise between message and form—a sort of celestial city
of the dead.
What is remarkable about Land, however, is that Romero has not had to sacrifice the comic book surface; if anything, it has returned in a much grander style than
was evident in the claustrophobic Day. To understand how Land can succeed so
well on both “levels,” we need to look beyond Romero’s evolution as a socially conscious filmmaker, or consciousness on the part of the critical establishment about
how to read the Dead films, and examine how historical developments and the postDay developments of the genre have affected the production and reception of Land.
In terms of the former, the use of the zombie as a lens through which to view the
historical moment (counterculture, commodity culture, fascism) is well understood.
In this regard, Land is obviously a response to the sharpening of global tensions
around the neoconservative agenda and the “war on terror,” as well as the (neo-)liberal capitulation to corporate interests that lay the groundwork for the neoconservative rise to power. In such a time, it is only fitting that Romero should return to the
zombie, a figure closely associated with imperialism. What interests me more than
the particular content of the historical moment, however, is the form through which
that content is reflected. Perhaps Romero would say the same thing about 2005 that
he said about 1968—perhaps, that is, we have reached another historical moment
when having a message is a given: “It’s 2005, man. Everybody has a ‘message.’” Recent
articles enumerating references to the Bush administration in recent Hollywood
fare would seem to bear this out (Chang; Dargis). And yet, “underbelly” or “allegory”
hardly seem the right terms to describe Land, so fully has the sociopolitical commentary been incorporated into the narrative. More than 1968 all over again, 2005
is a time of cartoon politics, a time when seemingly everything is “political,” and yet
nothing has any depth. What better time, then, to return to the grand comic book
style? Cronenberg’s comment about the politics of A History of Violence—that realpolitik “interbreeds” with genre and myth—takes on new life in Land. American
politics has become a dead ringer for Romero’s zombie world, Land a literalization
of the comic book moment. In such a world, fantasy is no longer parable, but a

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slightly tweaked version of reality. In such a world, comic book revolution suddenly
comes to seem not only fantastically possible, but inevitable.
Just as important as the comic book historical moment to Land’s collapsed allegory is the changed generic landscape in which it was produced. There is a tendency
to see Romero’s departure from filmmaking as a consequence not of his late disappointments with Hollywood, but of horror’s retrenchment in the 1980s; as with
Jonathan Crane on Cronenberg, the sense is that the genre morphed to such an
extent that it could no longer accommodate the director’s vision—hence the failure
of Day. But if the genre gets blamed for Romero’s departure, it might as well also be
credited for his return—not because the genre has become again what it was in the
1970s (despite apparent efforts to that effect), but because the postmodern playfulness that has characterized the genre since the 1990s has proven to be fertile new
ground for Romero’s vision.
As the father of the stumbling, flesh-eating ghoul, Romero can claim the wave
of zombie films following Night as his patrimony. His most important contribution
to the subgenre, however, was to make the zombie viable again as an allegory for
American society. Most recent zombie fare—including much of the late Resident
Evil-driven deluge—has capitalized on the zombie not to update its symbolic significance, but to utilize it for postmodern play. This is clearest in the case of outright
parody. No one, for example, could understand Shaun of the Dead without knowing
Romero’s series; a particular incarnation of the filmic zombie is being parodied.
But Shaun is only the most obvious in this regard, since parody has also crept into
ostensibly “straight” zombie films, and since audience expectations for zombie films
continue to be built almost entirely from the bricks and mortar of Romero’s Dead.
This turn to parody and the sort of thoughtless generic incest that seems to motivate much recent zombie fare has left many critics, and Romero himself, groaning
about post-Scream generic exhaustion, with the zombie as its appropriate motif: a
dead genre can only cannibalize its own past and regurgitate it for an increasingly
“knowing” audience, what Jonathan Crane has called “the vampiric, intertextual
feint, the sneering look back” (61) of postmodern horror.
And yet, we could look back a decade before Scream and find a similar anxiety about the Dead series itself, with the simultaneous release of Romero’s Day,
slammed as an empty rehashing of earlier Romero, Romero himself accused of
“running out of ideas,” and Return of the Living Dead, which got a lot of mileage out
of its characters trying to use the knowledge gained from Romero films to combat
zombies. The issue is not cannibalism, which is a trait of all genres, but rather the
manner in which the past is used. Barry Keith Grant, for example, has noted that
each time Romero confronts “his own monstrous offspring” (202), it is a chance for
the director to re-direct the subgenre’s evolution—that is, not to reward audiences’
“knowingness” about zombie films, but to extend, rethink, and perhaps even “correct”

the tradition he helped to invent. While I largely agree with Crane and Grant about
the 1990s’ generic drift and Romero’s avoidance of it, what is once again remarkable
about Land of the Dead is the way that it capitalizes on this trend rather than merely
repudiating or capitulating to it. The zombie Romero returns to in 2005 is a subtly
different figure from the social-allegorical monsters of Night, Dawn, and Day. It
has been so thoroughly deconstructed and reconstructed over the last decade that
it is no longer a zombie (i.e., a stumbling, moaning, flesh-eating being from which
the audience recoils). It is a walking trope. Horror audiences in the 1970s and 1980s
might have gotten a message about consumerism or patriarchy by “reading” Dawn
or Day, even if those messages seem “precious” in hindsight. But the audience for
Land arrives with that trope called “zombie” already present in its mind, ripe to be
plucked from its self-reflexive limbo and put back to work as social allegory. Land
doesn’t need to be read; it has no subtext. Its meaning is manifest in the figure of the
“zombie.” Once again, surface (rollicking horror-adventure) and message (war on
terror, class struggle) collapse onto one another. Thus where Romero once blamed
the failure of Day on competing with Return of the Living Dead’s spoof (Gagne 167),
with Land he has turned the recent run of zombie pastiche to his profit.
Land of the Dead was thus made possible by the convergence of two inverted
historical processes: toward fantasy in American politics, and toward self-reflexivity
in the genre. At the same time that the allegedly “real” sociopolitical content becomes
indistinguishable from the comic book fantastic, the fantastic figure of the zombie,
fired in the kiln of 1990s generic self-reflexivity, becomes a transparent window onto
social reality.
The imbrication of genre and history is apparent from Land’s opening credit
sequence: a grainy, black-and-white montage of corpses punctuated by staticky
radio transmissions reporting human-on-zombie violence is delivered following the
title, “Some time ago . . .”; the film proper begins following the title “Today.” For
all its apparent difference, Land immediately announces its present as our present;
generic and historical time merge. Of course, Land’s society will soon appear eerily
familiar: tiny ruling class, balkanized underclass, loss of civil liberties, and so on. Of
note here, too, is the efficiency with which Romero delivers subgeneric history: that
a series of unconnected images and voiceovers is sufficient to place the viewer in the
historical-generic “now” says as much about the economy of genre cinema per se as
it does about its audience, for whom the conventions of the Romero zombie film are
known by rote.
Land begins in “Uniontown,” a suburban version of Cronenberg’s Millbrook,
with the difference that everybody is dead, night to Millbrook’s radiant morning.
True to the series, Land’s dead seem once again to be condemned to parody the
labor or leisure that dominated their lives. But significant differences will soon
appear between these zombies and their predecessors. The film continues the

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series-long trend toward humanizing the monsters, offering us a zombie leading
man, complete with close-ups and choice wardrobe (Murray). Although Romero
always stressed the zombies’ working-class identity, here their connection to labor
is explicit. They appear, as Stuart Klawans put it, as a Pageant of Trades (44): the
black gas station attendant, the butcher with his cleaver. Finally and, given their new
class-consciousness, logically, Land’s zombies are also nascent radicals. If the zombies were never really “pure motorized instinct,” as “Frankenstein” said in Day, but
pure motorized ideology, as Wood might put it, Land charts their transition from
nostalgia for small-town capitalist America to longing for a revolutionary future. In
this context it makes sense to ask two questions: Is “a zombie world” possible? And
if so, what would it look like?
Big Daddy, the aptly named revolutionary zombie patriarch, continues the
leadership role of African Americans from other Dead films. It is Big Daddy who
takes the first step into the water separating Uniontown from the city, Big Daddy
who shows the butcher that his ordinary cleaver can be a tool for class revolt. Big
Daddy tries to rescue his fellow zombies from human marauders, a sympathy hardly
exhibited by most of the film’s human characters, who relentlessly cannibalize one
another. Most important, it is Big Daddy who shows the zombies how flimsy are the
walls erected around class privilege—not because of some fantasy of class mobility,
but because such barriers, as much as the “instinct” to consume, are ideological.
By making the zombie characters types, Romero does with them what he always
has with the human characters in his comic book cinema. Riley, the hardy Irish working-class hero; Cholo, the Hispanic immigrant full of bravado; Kaufman, the sneering capitalist: as types, the human characters clearly mirror not only the zombies,
but one another. Cholo, for example, is very much Kaufman’s creation: a monster of
capital, it is fitting the two should die locked in embrace. For all Cholo’s disparaging
of his father’s faith in the American dream—the father whom he symbolically kills
by shooting an arrow into a zombie futilely pushing a lawnmower in circles—Cholo
retains his father’s desire for class mobility. It is only after Cholo is bitten and transforms that he recognizes the “other half ” is not the zombies, but the ruling class.
If Cholo and Kaufman violently undermine the American dream, Riley is a more
ambiguous figure.16 Riley wants out rather than up, and he has compromised himself
as much as Cholo has to get what he wants. He has no faith in revolution—in anything, really, except himself. He is the loner, the American individualist who would
rather ride off into the sunset than help Malachy, the organizer, build a new society.
And yet, he does intend to build something—only “out there,” away from this, from
“people”: in Land’s world, to the north, where there is, as Kaufman puts it, nothing.
North becomes the new mythical West to be tamed and settled. In essence, Riley isn’t
all that different from Romero: the tinkerer creating for the powers-that-be until he
gets enough money to strike out on his own, with his crew of loyalists, the old days
of Latent Image or Laurel, when filmmaking was a family endeavor.17

By setting dead Uniontown in the suburbs, Land also updates the social geography of the Dead films. If up through the 1980s the suburbs were cannibalizing
the cities, the last ten years have seen this trend reverse itself, as the wealthy have
flooded back into an increasingly unaffordable, gentrified center, while the poor
have begun a slow march to an ever-more-degraded periphery. Inside Fiddler’s
Green, Land’s high rise for the WASP and wealthy, “Life goes on in the grand old
style.” At least, that’s what the television tells the Green’s residents. But the glitch in
that commercial, unnoticed except by the movie audience, reminds us that Fiddler’s
Green can appear natural only to those inhabiting the collective fiction that there is
no outside.18 As Riley notes, the wealthy are as trapped as the poor, and by the very
same barriers they have erected, which, at the end, become terribly real—because
they have made them so; because, like all of Romero’s doomed characters, they can
imagine nothing else. “Dine in,” says the television. The zombies do.
Wood and Waller have remarked on the significance of Peter’s giving up his
rifle to the zombies at the end of Dawn. There is no such capitulation in Land: the
human heroes ride away armed to the teeth; Big Daddy marches off with Peter’s
rifle strapped to his back. But if Land does not reject violence, it does reject spectacle, and makes a firm distinction between the two—between, that is, gore and
fireworks. This is crucial because, over the last twenty years, horror movie gore has
generally been equated with fireworks: pure spectacle that distracts the audience
from real issues (Grant 202; Sanjek 114; Crane 59). In speaking about the Dead
films, Romero has generally treated the Grand Guignol aspect as an essential part
of the zombie film aesthetic, but otherwise unrelated to the “underbelly”—at best
a “spoonful of gore” to help get the political medicine down the audience’s throat.
(Not for nothing Richard Rubinstein once called the gore effects in the Dead series
“the moneymakers” [Gagne 5].) In 2000, however, Romero offered a retrospective
justification of the zombie films’ gore: as in the surgery scenes in M*A*S*H, the
comic book surface is punctured by a splash of “cold water in the face,” “a wake-up
call” (Pinewood interview). This comment, however, might be better understood
as a prospective justification of the violence in Land; for to a greater degree than
the previous films, Land is a meditation on the relationship between audience and
spectacle.
The fireworks are aligned with one sort of violence: they allow the human-onzombie “massacre” to go on unimpeded, and as such they are symbolic of the kind
of spectacle that distracts working people “from conscious recognition of their own
oppression” (Williams). As is always the case in Land, the tenor is as important as
the vehicle: the fireworks are patriotic spectacle. Conversely, the fireworks stop zombie-on-human violence, or revolutionary violence, which, more than the first kind,
is the visceral, Grand Guignol violence associated with zombie films—not violence,
but gore. Romero explicitly marks this distinction twice in the film: at the beginning,
when Big Daddy crushes the severed head of a zombie that can’t take its eyes off the

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fireworks; and again at the end, when the fireworks fail to distract the zombies as
they close in upon a crowd fleeing Fiddler’s Green. The sadistic, spectacular glee of
Cholo’s gang’s motorcycle antics, so reminiscent of the end of Dawn, is replaced by a
haunting, subdued score and cross-cutting between the zombie feast and Riley and
his crew, its audience. The gulf between spectacle and message—between violent
entertainment as sedative and violence as the terrible price of class oppression, the
terrifying catharsis of revolution—has never been deeper.
The code for shooting off fireworks is also telling: “put some flowers in the
graveyard.” As Kim Paffenroth observes, we are back in the opening scene of Night
(120). Romero’s survivors have always had to learn to move beyond nostalgia for the
traditions of a dead society. The denizens of Fiddler’s Green do not (“Thank God,”
says one well-dressed man when fireworks appear, about to be consumed for God
and country). In Land, it is the zombies who learn to move beyond the dead rituals of patriotic celebration and the deadening routine of small-town life. Thus, for
all the incipient nostalgia of Uniontown, the answer to our initial question—what
would a zombie world look like?—is: Nothing like Millbrook.
But has Riley, too, learned to move beyond? Riley enables Romero to distance
himself from the film’s most radical political implications—not just the zombies’
revolutionary violence, but the similarities between Riley and Cholo-Kaufman.
Riley’s escape following the latter two’s joint immolation effectively disavows that
small and big capitalist are necessarily only different points along the same vector of capital accumulation. Moreover, post-apocalyptic fantasy always imagines a
quasi-colonialist “outside” to escape to, where moral order can be restored and profits can be tidy. But the ironic lesson of Romero’s career, and of the rather paltry 17
million studio dollars Land garnered by riding on the serendipitous coattails of a
few blockbusters, is that such “outside” places only exist in Hollywood movies. In a
system driven by the greatest gain for the smallest number in the shortest possible
time, no “two-dollar window” can last for very long. Perhaps this is why every fantasized “outside” always looks suspiciously like the inside; and what Vivian Sobchack
once remarked about families and patriarchy in the 1970s and 1980s sci-fi film holds
true for the zombie film, too: nostalgia for how things used to be is reimagined as
entirely new and projected into the future.

P o l i t i c s o f N o sta lg i a
The fireworks that close Land are also a celebration: of the long-anticipated end of the Dead tetralogy, and even more, of Romero’s return from the cinematic other side. Land may be less a capstone than a new beginning, as the more

recent Diary of the Dead (2008) capitalizes even more fully on self-reflexivity for
social critique.19 It is only fitting that Romero should take a leading role in the postparodic reanimation of the zombie. But there is a certain irony, too, as if only the
rightful ruler restored to the throne usurped by Parody could ensure that the subgenre’s social-allegorical fertility was secure. Here again, that ambivalence between
nostalgia and revolution, as the genre’s break with the cycle of meaningless repetition is effected through a return to tradition.
Although Cronenberg did not suffer the decade-long dry spell that Romero
did, Eastern Promises (2007), together with A History of Violence, also suggests that
the director has entered a new phase in his career, one that uses generic costumes
to deconstruct genre, and through it the myths on which genre thrives. Where Violence exorcised the American family, and America itself, of its pretensions to nature
and God-given essence, Promises sets the former’s ambiguities between family and
Family in a new global context. These two films are more explicit about their sociopolitical milieux than any of Cronenberg’s previous films except M Butterfly—
although the director would no doubt consider this veneer for his metaphysical
obsessions. True to form, Promises continues to explore the problematic of disguise
and/as self-making.
The horror films of the 1970s have been championed for expressing deep-seated
anxieties about capitalism and patriarchy. In this regard, it is ironic that while some
contemporary horror directors busy themselves with seventies pastiche, the “old
auteurs” are engaging with the present. It is a bit churlish of me, however, to spotlight these two filmmakers without emphasizing that the genre as a whole is nudging toward a political Renaissance (D’Agnolo-Vallan 24; “Horror”), and that some
young directors are looking backward not as unthinking participants in a broader
cultural fixation on the 1970s, but for models and inspiration. Perhaps we really are
in a new moment of “ideological crisis,” when the “full significance” of the genre is
beginning to re-“emerge” (Wood, Hollywood 118).
For those of us for whom Cronenberg and Romero are as the prophets Isaiah
and Ezekiel were to William Blake, it is difficult to watch their recent films without a
touch of nostalgia for their generic patriarchal authority and for a time when making
movies outside the Hollywood system seemed less compromised, and not yet fully
co-opted as a Hollywood fantasy itself; before the boundaries between center and
periphery, power and powerlessness, were blurred; and before the oppressive conditions of production were obscured by an ideology of creative consumer liberation.
Perhaps it’s not that 2005 is 1968 all over again, but that those who were making
movies in 1968 see a renewed potential in 2005 for political engagement, while those
who started making horror movies in the last decade look at 2005 and can only feel
nostalgic for a 1968 they never experienced: a politics of pastiche and nostalgia.

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N ot e s
1. As Andrew Sarris remarked in 1977, auteurism was never so much a theory as a tendency,
“more a mystique than a methodology” (29). Sarris should know: in his seminal “Notes on
the Auteur Theory in 1962” (in Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed., ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall
Cohen, and Leo Baudry [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]), he defined the auteur
for American readers less by what it is than by what it is not: beyond the tangible elements of
technical competence or even style (although the boundary between the latter and the auteur is
hardly distinguishable); “not quite” mise-en-scène, “not quite” worldview; “interior meaning” partly
“imbedded in the stuff of cinema,” the “intangible difference between one personality and another”
(587; my emphasis). The auteur is thus more than just the essentially cinematic element of
filmmaking: he is purity distilled from impurity, a coherent, individual identity from a collaborative
art form, and the halo of art around the edges of commerce. Even as the auteur strained against the
rise of more systematic critical schools whose stated goal was demystification, the auteur proved to
have a near-magical tenacity. This is clearest in Peter Wollen’s (mis)appropriation of structuralism
in the service of the theory it was intended to supplant—a sort of attempt to rescue auteur
theory from itself; “The Auteur Theory,” Film Theory and Criticism, 4th ed., ed. Gerald Mast,
Marshall Cohen, and Leo Baudry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Bordwell has
written extensively on film criticism’s perennial urge to “save auteurism” by attaching it to other,
contradictory modes of reading; see Making Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989), particularly chapters 3–4; 43–102.
2. Ian Conrich has traced the way a “prozine” like Fangoria consolidated its identity, and
the identity of the genre, around the sort of “body horror” with which directors like David
Cronenberg and George A. Romero would come to be associated; see Ian Conrich, “An
Aesthetic Sense: Cronenberg and Neo-Horror Film Culture,” Modern Fantastic: The Films of
David Cronenvberg, ed. Michael Grant (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000). But Fangoria was
just as important, I think, for the way in which it responded to the more general trend in the
film industry toward the director as an independent creative artist, and participated in the
construction of the “horror auteur” for a genre audience. Although special effects were to become
its particular fetish, Fangoria devoted more text to interviews with writers, producers, and (above
all) directors than had Famous Monsters, the flagship genre publication for many years previous.
As the magazine grew over the first half of the 1980s, Fangoria would devote an ever-increasing
amount of space to a small cadre of visionary directors, including Cronenberg and Romero. For
this reason, the horror fan, moreso than other moviegoers, is predisposed to understand horror
as a director’s cinema: to see a Cronenberg movie, a Romero movie. The tendency to append these
directors’ names to their movie titles is case in point, and mirrors a similar trend in art-cinema
advertising; see David Bordwell, “Authorship and Narration in Art Cinema,” Film and Authorship,
ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 42–49.
For some interesting corroborating evidence of this “horror auteur” phenomenon, see Paul Wells’s
summary of his “Spinechillers” survey findings, in The Horror Genre (New York: Wallflower,
2004), 27–35.
3. eXistenZ (1999) is the sole exception. I am aware that this irony depends on whose auteur
theory one subscribes to: the genre director working with another writer’s material who is thus
forced to express himself in purely cinematic terms, or the writer-director who works with a
recognizable set of themes—a confusion that reflects the fog of mystique around the auteur more
generally. Film criticism has tended to prefer theme to style (Bordwell, Making Meaning, 79), and
post-classical Hollywood, “auteur” has come to imply writer-director. Romero would probably

support a “semantic” version of auteur theory, since he has spoken about the way the cost of the
medium hampers the development of an original style; Paul R. Gagne, The Zombies That Ate
Pittsburgh (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986), 7.
4. Dead Ringers is an understandable but somewhat problematic choice for a turning point.
One thinks, for example, of Sid Scheinberg’s (at Universal studios) argument that Videodrome
should be marketed as an art film, a decision with which Cronenberg agreed; see Chris Rodley,
Cronenberg on Cronenberg (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), 59; and Bob Martin, “On the Set of
The Dead Zone,” Fangoria 26: 42–44). For further discussion of this tension/hybridity between
art cinema and horror, see Steffen Hantke, “Genre and Authorship in David Cronenberg’s
Naked Lunch,” Twentieth-Century American Fiction On Screen, ed. R. Barton Palmer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 164–79, esp. 173; William Paul, Laughing, Screaming: Modern
Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 369.
5. Even by the early 1980s, Leo Braudy argues, horror had “become the dominant genre, even
invading with its images and motifs films that are otherwise not really ‘horror’ films” (1), such
as the police thriller; in Gregory Waller, “Introduction,” American Horrors, ed. Gregory Waller
(Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1987), 10. It is a trend that has continued apace (witness the
Saw series, whose killer’s macabre inventiveness owes as much to the Faustian experimenters of
sci-fi as to slasher movies, and whose sequel potential must be starting to make Jason nervous).
Nor have other genres been reticent to adopt horror’s graphic violence and apocalyptic quasisupernaturalism: the Western (The Proposition) and the disaster film (The Day After and the War
of the Worlds remake) are two examples. Conversely, horror has hardly been immune to adopting
the conventions and elements of other genres, such as the survival adventure (The Last Winter,
The Descent). And bladder effects and prosthetics have found their way (back?) into FX-laden
comedies, like the Men in Black franchise. Regarding the backward gaze, I would point to the
return of the big-budget supernatural and the current “retro-obsession” (Corrigan’s term) with
the 1970s more generally—from Grindhouse, pastiche’s nadir, to the remakes of The Hills Have
Eyes and Dawn of the Dead and the phenomenon of Rob Zombie.
6. One generic feature of the Cronenberg interview is the moment when the interviewer
compares the film under discussion to someone else’s, or mentions that it bears the marks of
another filmmaker, only to have the director challenge or reinterpret this. Another is the tale of
originality vindicated. In the interview on the Shivers DVD, for example, the director recounts
a story about being accused of “stealing” Dan O’Bannon’s parasite idea from Alien, and then
straightening out his accuser. It certainly helps to explain his dislike for the film, which he once
described as “a man in a crocodile suit chasing a bunch of people around a room” (qtd. in Bob
Martin, “The Brood and Other Terrors,” Fangoria 3 (December 1971): 13)—this after remarking
that it was devoid of subtext (!). He would probably also disavow the debt Jonathan Crane has
identified to earlier sci-fi, just as the comparison between Star Wars and Scanners Handling and
Beard make in their 1982 interview was immediately recuperated by the director, who noted that
both films are influenced by classical texts; Serge Grünberg, David Cronenberg: Interviews with
Serge Grünberg, rev. ed. (London: Plexus, 2006). In the same interview, Cronenberg recounts a
story about being accused and then vindicated of stealing the story idea for “Transfer” (1966), his
first short. Today, his auteur status universally confirmed, there is far less at stake in admitting
influence as when he was struggling to forge his artistic identity. In some rather stark reversals
from earlier interviews, he has spoken to Grünberg about his interest in low-budget horror and
his early filmgoing experiences (17–18, 29), and has repudiated his earlier impatience with directors
who did not write their own screenplays; see Ira Nayman, “Definitely a David Cronenberg Film:
An Interview with David Cronenberg,” Creative Screenwriting 6.2 (1999): 71–73.

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7. For Beard, “to imply some leaching away of authorial originality [in Cronenberg’s turn
to adaptation] . . . is a canard” (Monster, 423). Then again, the real “canard” may be the claim to
authorial originality itself: Dead Ringers, for one, seems to bear greater resemblance to the novel
than Cronenberg would care to admit. See Mark Browning, David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), 81–109, 201.
8. One wonders whether Cronenberg has a tendency to overstate his case in the polemic
surrounding his films, or if he just does it to shock; to say the endings of Shivers or Videodrome
are “happy” hardly does justice to the ambivalence which Cronenberg’s most sensitive readers
have noted in all of his films, and which Cronenberg himself, when he is not backed into a corner,
has acknowledged. Cronenberg’s much-touted “balance,” his ability to see both sides of an issue
(once again attributed to his numinous Canadianness), tends to vanish when he feels his films
are being attacked; in the 1999 Cineaste interview, he speaks in more measured terms about
the ambiguity of the images of liberation in his films. But the problem of the representation of
liberation as monstrosity is endemic to the genre as a whole. Wood returned to this in “Neglected
Nightmares” (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond [New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003], 97), where he calls for the death of Dracula, and by extension of a genre
which had “served [its] purpose” (100) of releasing repressed energy.
9. Perhaps this is the meaning of Cronenberg’s combined reference to Melville and Whitman
as literary kindred spirits (Tim Lucas, “The Image as Virus: The Filming of Videodrome,” The
Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, ed. Piers Handling [New York: Zoetrope, 1983],
155). They died within a year of each other, one the consummate outsider forgotten by his
time, the other the most popular poet of his day. Taken together, they represent the fantasy of
being at once inside and outside of one’s own time, of mainstream popularity and transcendent,
misunderstood artistry.
10. For example, the conceived and executed bleeding potato that never appeared in Spider
because the director decided it was “from some other movie” (Pinewood interview)—that is, an
early Cronenberg movie.
11. For a somewhat fuller discussion of this, see Mary Campbell’s remarkably suggestive
“Biological Alchemy and the Films of David Cronenberg,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the
Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1984), 307–20.
12. The father-son relationship is similarly denied closure. The bloody father-son hug directly
after young Jack Stall has killed Fogarty foreshadows another troubling embrace: Richie hugging
Joey. Like the deadly embraces in Rabid, these embraces between male relatives seem to pass the
virus of violence along.
13. The Romero of circa 1966 has almost nothing in common with the image of the director
that had crystallized by the late 1970s: bearded, bearish, holding a cigarette instead of a script,
and wearing that trademark lucky scarf. The Romero of today is similarly transformed—so much
so that, the first time I saw a picture of him post-Land of the Dead, I did not recognize him. He
has aged inordinately in the fifteen years since the publicity stills for Two Evil Eyes: wizened,
hair white, and for the first time sporting glasses, enormous glasses that sit heavily on his face.
Compare this, once again, to Cronenberg, who was already wearing his trademark glasses (the
smug intellectual) in the midsixties. He has since lost them, but it has only increased the intensity
of his gaze; and despite his claims to complete transformation, the features and expression
remain unmistakably Cronenberg. He has aged with a sort of calm assurance—odd for one for
whom mortality has been a central artistic preoccupation.
14. A similar ambivalence destroyed the 1970s auteurs who went to Hollywood with
aspirations of remaking the system; and in this light it is tempting to think of Romero as an

image of what Francis Ford Coppola’s career might have looked like had he never gone west. The
term “romantic entrepreneur,” which Timothy Corrigan applies to Coppola (108), fits Romero as
well, if read with a Pittsburgh accent; see Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture
after Vietnam (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Matt Becker finds the same
ambivalence operating in all the seventies “horror auteurs”: all self-described hippies, all looking
for the big hit, and all walking a fine line between spectacular and oppositional violence; Becker,
“A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence,” The Velvet Light
Trap 57 (Spring 2006): 42–59. They thus closely mirror the second wave of the New Hollywood,
the so-called brutalists, as the inception of a more jaundiced view of the counterculture; see Peter
Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 314.
15. Conversely, when Yakir asked Romero about the thematic significance of the suburban
home in Martin, Romero immediately turned his answer to the home’s visual appeal. Romero
may or may not write his films message-first, but what often comes through in interviews is a
fascination with surface.
16. By allowing the Irish laborer of yesteryear to rub shoulders with today’s largely Latino
working class, Romero has once again capitalized on postmodern pastiche, in this case to assert
the invariant of an immigrant laboring class across different moments in American history, and
perhaps to join “today” with a time when class divisions were more deeply felt and consciously
understood.
17. It is ironic that Romero’s characters are always looking to get to Canada, that “nothing”
space where self-creation is more than just a myth, and where directors like David Cronenberg
seem to have had the opportunity to do just that. Or perhaps Canada is the place where a
benevolent government subsidizes independent filmmakers? Regardless, it seems significant that
Romero now makes his home in Cronenberg’s native city.
18. The underclass is hardly better, having their pictures taken while fake-screaming beside a
chained zombie, inured as the audiences of today to the zombie’s revolutionary potential. In this
respect it is only too fitting that the makers and stars of Shaun of the Dead are present here. For
all Romero’s expressed admiration for Shaun, it is Land’s mission to help liberate the zombie from
this generic status quo.
19. Diary’s protagonists are film students shooting a horror movie, and the film itself is
cobbled together from intradiegetic video footage. According to Romero, Diary was “inspired
. . . by a desire to address not the terrors of modern life, but the relentless impulse to record
them,” itself a product of feelings of helplessness in the face of the seriously “fucked” state of the
world. See Nathan Lee, “Videocam of the Dead,” Village Voice, September 19, 2007, 66, 69.

Masters of Horror (2005–2007) is a television anthology series that debuted on
October 28, 2005, on U.S. cable network Showtime and ran for two seasons. Each
season comprises thirteen self-contained hour-long episodes, each directed by a different “Master of Horror”: a director deemed to have made a significant contribution
to the horror genre. The show and the special features attached to its subsequent
DVD releases (director interviews, tributes from past collaborators, commentaries)
are exercises in self-fashioning for contemporary horror filmmakers; that is, they
provide a site where directors can fashion and master their public personae. The
Masters of Horror project is an attempt to bestow prestige upon genre practitioners:
it asserts that auteurship exists within horror cinema, and that the genre deserves
greater critical respect.
However, the DVD special features are sites of tension between self-fashioning
and self-sabotaging impulses that materialize throughout the self-fashioning process, while the selection process behind the series—who is involved and why—calls
into question the legitimacy of the title of Master of Horror. This chapter offers
a deconstructive analysis of both the Master label and the self-fashioning motifs
that run through the DVD extras, and will explore tensions circulating around and
within the project, with a particular focus on directors Stuart Gordon and John
Landis, their season-one episodes, and the accompanying DVD paratexts. Ultimately, I wish to suggest that the assortment of tensions constituting the series is
dialectical.1

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S i r G a r r i s a n d t h e G r i s ly K n i g h ts
The following promotional passage is an example of typically hyperbolic advertising
for the series that appeared in a trailer for the show’s second-season DVD releases:
They are possessed by the dark . . .
They share an obsession for terror . . .
13 all new terrifying tales . . .
13 visionary directors . . .
13 hours of mind altering fear . . .
From the Emmy Award winning anthology . . .
Masters of Horror2
This passage proclaims that the Masters of Horror are visionaries obsessed
with terror and possessed by darkness who will, if given the opportunity, alter your
mind. Such exaggerated assertions position the filmmakers as real-life equivalents
of the director of La Fin Absolue du Monde, the fictional film that triggers insanity at the center of John Carpenter’s episode “Cigarette Burns” (2005). This sort
of hyperbole continues a tradition of horror movie advertising dating back to the
Universal monster movies of the 1930s starring the likes of Boris Karloff; while the
appropriation of this style is perhaps deliberately ironic, when taken at face value
it complicates our consideration of the Master denomination, especially given its
incongruity with the more tongue-in-cheek origins of this denomination (and,
indeed, a number of the episodes).
Masters of Horror arose, humbly enough, from a series of bimonthly dinners
in which horror filmmakers got together and, half-jokingly and half- knowingly,
labeled themselves the “Masters of Horror.” The series itself was masterminded and
spearheaded by one of these Masters, Mick Garris, best known for directing the
television miniseries of The Stand (1994) and The Shining (1997). Garris recalls how
the dinners came about, and by extension how the show came into being:
For a long time, a lot of us who worked in the genre, film directors, had been
saying, “Oh, we ought to get together sometime, it would be great [to] do this”
[. . .] It took weeks to schedule a night where everybody could make it. So we
had a dozen guys—John Landis, John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, Tobe
Hooper, and so on—and we all had such a great time, that a couple of months
later we did another one and it took me an hour to put it together. I’ve been
wanting to do an anthology series for a long time, so this kind of eased the
way. (Wilson)

The directors who contributed to the show’s first season were Garris, John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, Don Coscarelli, John Landis, Lucky McKee, Larry Cohen,
Joe Dante, John McNaughton, Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, William Malone, and
Takashi Miike.3 While each episode of the series is completely distinct, the episodes
are linked together as a series by the same introductory credit sequence, which features drops of blood raining down on a blank white screen, a skull floating toward
the camera, a baby doll coming to life and smiling malevolently, and other assorted
signifiers of horror.4 There is also some continuity in the behind-the-scenes crew,
including Greg Nicotero and his special effects house KNB.
The title of Master immediately raises a variety of deconstructive impulses in
both the aficionado and the academic. No matter how tongue-in-cheek the Master
denomination may have originally been, the fact remains that it immediately generates high expectations for an audience. In an essay on horror “event” movies like The
Mummy (1999) and Hannibal (2001), Phillip L. Simpson asserts that an event movie
“becomes or sustains a cultural force” (86). Masters of Horror fits these criteria: the
series was marketed on the premise that it united “visionary” directors and gave
them complete creative freedom to unleash their imaginations without censorship
restrictions, which generated buzz online and in print media (both mainstream and
horror-oriented). The Masters of Horror imprint generates expectations, and thus
invites both consideration and deconstruction from the outset, starting with the
Master label upon which the series was founded.
The Master label asserts each director’s mastery of the genre for mainstream
audiences; however, the loaded nature of this label invites more discriminating
viewers to call into question the grounds on which a director can be canonized as a
Master of Horror. Established horror auteurs such as John Carpenter are relatively
secure in their entitlement; others are much less so. Lucky McKee directed the wellreceived May (2002) but had not delivered an extended or consistent body of work
that could be deemed necessary for qualification as a Master prior to his canonization. McKee’s position is thus more akin to that of apprentice than Master. William
Malone’s body of work is larger, but his most recent feature films, House on Haunted
Hill (1999) and (especially) FearDotCom (2002), were both critically lambasted. In
the case of Garris, his aforementioned Stephen King adaptations were maligned
by both King fans and cinephiles (though were praised by King himself ), while
earlier efforts like Critters 2: The Main Course (1988) and Psycho IV: The Beginning
(1990) actually undermine and deride the title of Master. Meanwhile, both John
McNaughton and John Landis have delivered classic films often associated with the
horror genre—Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and An American Werewolf in
London (1981), respectively—but the bulk content of their filmographies is outside
the horror genre, a fact which complicates their inclusion.

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A critique of the series in the Washington Times asserts that the show “purports to let horror’s brightest stars scare us anew. The fact is, the horror genre has
precious few stars in its galaxy” (Yourse). While this critique is emblematic of the
mainstream in its dismissive and disparaging attitude toward the genre, it nonetheless touches on a raw nerve evident in the show’s creative assembly line. The Master label implies the existence of a stable canon of horror filmmakers, an assertion
that proves to be flawed on closer inspection. The title of Master thus generates
all sorts of questions about discrimination in the assembling of the show’s talent
pool, questions that ultimately affect our response to the series. For instance, all
of the directors who have contributed to the show are men, and all but three of
them (Takashi Miike, Ernest Dickerson, and Norio Tsuruta) are white. This sexual
and racial exclusion is undoubtedly symptomatic of the dominant position of white
males within the Hollywood film industry. The recent reincarnation of Masters of
Horror on NBC, Fear Itself (2008), addressed this gender discrimination somewhat
superficially by including one female auteur, Mary Harron, the director of American
Psycho (2000).
In some of the print advertising for the series, the show was sold on the basis
of the Masters’ previous films rather than their names, the publicity department
perhaps wisely realizing that names like Don Coscarelli and Larry Cohen do not
automatically signify films like Phantasm (1979) and It’s Alive (1974) for most mainstream audiences. One such print advertisement went as follows:
Their wildest dreams are your worst nightmares
13 original one-hour movies from the directors of
Halloween
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Poltergeist
The Stand
An American Werewolf in London
The Howling
Phantasm
Re-Animator
It’s Alive
The very idea of Masters of Horror is based upon canonizing specific individuals responsible for quality horror films. However, this advertising instead capitalizes on the name recognition of these horror films, and the series is sold through
the movies—Halloween (1978), The Howling (1981), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1974)—rather than the individuals who directed them, the supposed Masters. The
directors are nameless entities in this advertisement, represented by just one (in

Tobe Hooper’s case two) of their feature films. Each film title represents a selfcontained and highly regarded text, whereas a director’s name would signify a larger
body of work that may or may not sustain the same level of reverence as an isolated
text. Even worse, a director’s name may draw either blank responses from those
outside horror fandom or interrogative responses (such as the one presently being
mounted) from those within. This publicity decision, thus, makes sense, but still
undermines the thrust of the project.5
Obviously the terms and conditions of each director’s contribution to the genre
were relatively flexible, and directors were not required to have made prolonged,
sustained contributions to the genre of a consistently high quality. Veteran directors
and emerging directors alike, not to mention directors who generally work outside
the genre but nonetheless have made some sort of contribution, are present. As
such, McNaughton, Landis, and McKee are canonized as Masters based upon their
few acclaimed contributions to the genre rather than sustained bodies of horror
work, while Garris and Malone are canonized as Masters due to the tenure of their
work in the genre. Such flexibility, however, still raises eyebrows. In the featurette
“Imprinting: The Making of Imprint” (2006), Takashi Miike jokes that “I think they
thought, Ok, he directed Audition, let’s ask him” (Oneda). Meanwhile, a contributor
to the Internet discussion group Horror at Indiana: Horror in Film and Literature
comments in a post that “I think that general selection process for being a ‘Master’
of horror is that you either know Mick Garris or just agree to be on the program”
(Swindoll). These criteria certainly apply to Landis, who served as executive producer on Garris’s directorial debut, the television family movie Fuzz Bucket (1986),
and appears in several of Garris’s films.
While the presence of certain directors and the absence of others calls into
question the legitimacy of the title of Master, we cannot afford to ignore the matter
of simple logistics. Ultimately, the final roll call for Masters of Horror is dependent
on a variety of factors. By way of example, both George Romero and Roger Corman
were lined up to direct episodes but dropped out due to extenuating circumstances
and were replaced by McNaughton and McKee.6 Would the series have been more
or less authentic if Romero and Corman had participated? Whatever the case, the
final assortment of directors was ultimately contingent upon matters of availability,
scheduling, interest, and financing.
All this begs an obvious question: just how easy is it to become a Master of
Horror? Just how few qualifications can a filmmaker get away with while still fitting
the criteria? While Fright Night (1985) and Child’s Play (1988) director Tom Holland has some claim to the title of Master, do Ernest Dickerson and Rob Schmidt,
who were likewise canonized as Masters in the show’s second season, really deserve
canonization on the basis of the Snoop Dogg vehicle Bones (2001) and Wrong Turn
(2003), respectively? How vested are Garris’s own interests here? Is Garris using

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the project to canonize himself as a Master of Horror alongside the likes of Dario
Argento and Tobe Hooper, while fleshing out the numbers needed to justify the
project with anyone who may have directed a halfway decent horror film?
Value judgments aside, the whole Masters of Horror enterprise can be read as
an exercise in self-fashioning. The term itself is derived from an early book by the
New Historicist literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare (1980). In this book, Greenblatt analyzes the careers of
Tudor England artists and luminaries Thomas More, William Tyndale, Thomas
Wyatt, Edmund Spencer, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare and
considers how these individuals fashioned their identities through artful processes
which blurred the distinctions between reality and fiction, between life and text.
The term self-fashioning describes these processes. We can see self-fashioning at
work in Masters of Horror, with each filmmaker using their episode, their DVD
special features, and the Master label to fashion themselves as important horror
directors; indeed, as Masters of Horror. My key interest in self-fashioning resides
in Greenblatt’s observation (no doubt a product of New Historicism’s roots in poststructuralist nihilism) that “any achieved identity always contains within itself the
signs of its own subversion or loss” (9); that is, subversion is interiorized within the
orchestrated identity of the artist. This internalized subversive force materializes
constantly throughout Masters of Horror, in relation to the self-fashioning of individual directors and within the foundations of the show as a whole. Its exploration
will form the thrust of this essay.
Self-fashioning is hardly new to the horror genre. The most entrepreneurial
of horror directors would undoubtedly be William Castle, whose films during the
1950s and 1960s were accompanied by various extra-textual gimmicks: life insurance policies, flying skeletons, electric shocks, and so forth. Castle’s showmanship
and theatricality left a lasting impression on Stuart Gordon.7 The director identifies
The Tingler as an important film from his younger years (P. Martin, “Damnation”),
thus inviting association with Castle and aligning his own work with Castle’s highly
theatrical style of filmmaking.8
The William Castle tradition of showmanship and theatricality still continues
today in the genre, and we can see instances of this from several of the Masters of
Horror. Take, for instance, John Carpenter Presents Body Bags (1993), an anthology
of three short horror films in which Carpenter plays a wacky coroner in a morgue
who introduces each segment.9 Meanwhile, Takashi Miike makes a cameo appearance in Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), a film heavily associated with Miike’s own Audition
(1999). Miike plays a satisfied customer leaving the warehouse where abducted travelers are brutally tortured, thus inserting himself into the American torture-porn
tradition, upon which Audition was a major influence.10
These examples, however, are fairly broad instances of performative self-fashioning in the genre. More commonly, DVD special features provide filmmakers with

a platform for performative self-fashioning: to inform and educate audiences on the
making of a film, to frame and shape a viewer’s perception and reception of the material, and to fashion themselves through commentaries, interviews, and so on.
Given the level of self-fashioning that takes place around rather than within
artistic texts, it comes as little surprise that the individual episodes of Masters of Horror contribute very little to the self-fashioning process. Though the episodes act as
showcases for each filmmaker’s directorial skills, these showcases are compromised
by budgetary and casting limitations, shooting conditions, and other restrictions.
In addition, each episode varies in quality, and some suffer from the tight financial
and shooting restrictions more than others. As such, the special features attached
to the show’s DVD releases are far more exemplary exercises in self-fashioning, and
go further to justify and validate the Master status of each director. Veteran horror
directors like Carpenter and Argento use these special features to genealogize their
oeuvres and to canonize themselves as legitimate artists, while emerging directors
and non-horror directors strive to insert themselves within this evolving genealogy.
DVD features serve as useful paratexts. According to Gerard Genette, paratexts are “all those things which we are never certain belong to the text of a work but
which contribute to present—or ‘presentify’—the text” (qtd. in Allen 104). Furthermore, their function, according to Genette, is “to ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author’s purpose” (qtd. in Allen 107). Paratexts stand on the threshold
of a text and shape our reading of that text. In this respect, DVD special features
certainly qualify and operate as paratexts. The paratextual material on the Masters
of Horror DVDs is shaped by both the Masters themselves and other behind-thescenes personnel. Genette points out that paratexts can be both autographic (created by the author/director) and allographic (created by others), but I would argue
that DVD special features are both. Although much of the supplementary material
on DVDs is not directly shaped by the director of the titular text, these special
features are mostly consistent with the intentions of the text they accompany. In the
case of the Masters of Horror paratexts, each Master remains a guiding, synthesizing presence, and the supplementary material provided to honor these directors is
tailored to fashion them as legitimate horror movie Masters.
Horror films have often been maligned in respectable critical circles, and the
Masters of Horror DVD project attempts to address this situation; its special features
are fashioned to legitimize horror filmmakers as auteurs and to establish that genre
practitioners are worthy of such credentials. As such, the DVD special features that
accompany the Masters of Horror episodes will be the main objects of analysis in this
chapter, and the next two sections will specifically explore the self-fashioning of two
particular filmmakers, Stuart Gordon and John Landis. Both Gordon and Landis,
aged sixty-two and fifty-nine, respectively, have made significant contributions to
the genre, though Gordon’s body of horror work is decidedly more substantial, and
both seek recognition as Masters of Horror through Masters of Horror.11

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However, the DVD special features are also sites of tension between self-fashioning and self-sabotaging impulses, and in these textual supplements we glimpse
the “subversion or loss” of their subject’s “achieved identity” (Greenblatt 9). The
main self-fashioning and self-sabotaging motifs to be explored throughout this
essay are: each director’s courting of association with illustrious predecessors, and
their attempts to contextualize their work within broader artistic movements inside
and outside horror cinema; the selective and discriminatory manner in which each
director recollects his career; the extent of, and level of authority attached to, each
director’s posturing as a horror Master; and the strategies and techniques employed
by both the directors and the makers of the special features to shape each director’s
self-fashioning, and the materials and testimonials selected for this intent.
The focus of my analysis will be the special features that accompany the
season-one DVD releases of Gordon’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (2005) and
Landis’s “Deer Woman” (2005). The core special features which accompany each
disc include: a twenty- to twenty-five-minute interview with each director in which
he recounts his career, as well as his experiences working on Masters of Horror; a
“Working with a Master” featurette in which previous collaborators (actors, producers, writers) wax lyrical on their experiences working with the director;12 a short
making-of segment which unobtrusively observes typically amiable directors on
typically pleasant sets with typically dedicated crews; short interview segments of
about five minutes in which the lead actors recount their experiences working on
the episode; and audio commentaries by members of the cast and crew. Gordon
shares his commentary with lead actor Ezra Godden, while Landis is absent from
the “Deer Woman” commentary, which features, instead, actors Brian Benben and
Anthony Griffith.13 My analyses of Gordon and Landis will concentrate primarily
on material taken from the director interviews and tribute featurettes. The Landis
and Gordon director interviews are both directed by Anchor Bay’s Perry Martin
(who also directs equivalent interviews with Argento, Carpenter, Dante, and Coscarelli), while frequent Anchor Bay contributor Frank H. Woodward handles their
“Working with a Master” tribute featurettes (and equivalent tributes for most of the
other first-season directors).

(1990), Fortress (1993), and Space Truckers (1996). In “Dreams, Darkness & Damnation: An Interview with Stuart Gordon” (2006), the director comments that he
had “always liked horror movies, ever since my parents refused to let me see them”
(P. Martin, “Damnation”). This equation of horror with forbidden fruit appears to
fuel Gordon’s work in a number of ways: his films gorge themselves on violence
and nudity and pursue broad excess, and a sense of mischief and playfulness runs
through the likes of Re-Animator and From Beyond.
Gordon’s season-one Masters of Horror contribution, “Dreams in the Witch
House,” is consistent with the director’s body of work: the film’s tone is broad and
theatrical, and Gordon is generous with its violent and sexual content. By extension,
it is tied to Gordon’s previous work through the presence of Gordon’s frequent writing partner Dennis Paoli, frequent composer Richard Band, and Dagon lead actor
Ezra Godden, and through its connection to horror author H. P. Lovecraft. The
featurette “Dreams, Darkness & Damnation” stresses Gordon’s ongoing association with Lovecraft, as well as his early history as a theater director—a history that
Gordon returned to recently with his film of playwright David Mamet’s Edmond
(2005)—two qualities which play an important role in Gordon’s self-fashioning.
“Working with a Master: Stuart Gordon” (2006)—featuring interviews with producer Brian Yuzna and actors Godden, Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken
Foree, and Carolyn Purdy-Gordon—also stresses these qualities.
Yuzna, Combs, and Crampton each discuss Gordon’s theatrical background
and draw attention to the fact that Gordon works closely with actors before production in a process akin to theater rehearsals (Woodward, “Gordon”). Combs
also notes that each Stuart Gordon film has an “audience participation quality to
it” (Woodward, “Gordon”), and that the seeds of this quality stem from Gordon’s
theater work. Reference is made to a theater piece Gordon directed in 1968 at the
University of Wisconsin’s Screw Theatre called The Game Show, a grim piece in
which audience members (actors planted throughout the audience) were brought
on stage and tortured.14 Purdy-Gordon, who is Gordon’s wife and has collaborated
with her husband on stage and screen, comments that she broke up with Gordon
for three months after first seeing the play because she felt it was “morally irresponsible of him to put people in that much fear” (Woodward, “Gordon”).15 A portrait
of Gordon as provocateur is being painted, just as Gordon’s horror movie (i.e., lowart) oeuvre and its intentions are being aligned with his theatrical (i.e., high-art)
background.
Gordon himself discusses his tenure as artistic director of Chicago’s Organic
Theatre Company—a tenure spanning from 1970 to 1985—in “Dreams, Darkness
& Damnation.” The director cites his early association with Mamet, whose first play,
Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Gordon staged in 1974, to further establish his credibility as a theater practitioner. However, Gordon also notes that he clashed with the

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Organic Theatre Company over his plans to direct Re-Animator (P. Martin, “Damnation”). Thus, while Gordon refers to his theatrical background in order to feed
off its high-art status (this status a symptom of an elitist and somewhat contrived
high-art–low-art dichotomy) and to give himself credibility and prestige as an artist, he also distances himself from this medium which was ultimately too conservative for his horror movie ambitions. But according to Anchor Bay DVD producer
Perry Martin, Gordon’s theatricality can still be glimpsed in his work, such as in the
theatrical special effects used throughout “Dreams in the Witch House” (Gordon,
Godden, and Martin). Indeed, the action of the episode takes place predominantly
in one location and features a small ensemble of actors, qualities that also reflect a
theatrical inclination.
Horror luminary H. P. Lovecraft’s influence on contemporary horror fiction,
both cinematic and literary, is substantial.16 Gordon has courted association with
Lovecraft throughout the course of his career by adapting Lovecraft’s work to the
screen: Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon, “Dreams in the Witch House,” and the
forthcoming The Thing on the Doorstep are all Lovecraft adaptations.17 Gordon has
also, to a lesser extent, courted association with Edgar Allan Poe through his adaptations of The Pit and the Pendulum and, for Masters’ second season, “The Black
Cat” (2007). Thus, long before Masters of Horror, Gordon courted association with
other recognized Masters of Horror and sought to be aligned with their oeuvres.
The series gives Gordon an opportunity to continue this creative alignment, and
(according to the Masters Web site) to “confirm his place as the premiere director of
Lovecraft’s tales of terror” (“Season 1”).
Gordon’s numerous allusions to Lovecraft throughout the Masters of Horror
special features transcend simple matters of tribute. Gordon uses his theatrical
pedigree to legitimize himself as an artist, but he must also legitimize and provide
justification for his shift from the high-art, highbrow medium of theater to the lowart, lowbrow medium of low-budget filmmaking: low-budget horror filmmaking,
no less. As such, it makes sense that Gordon devotes considerable time to discussing
Lovecraft, because Lovecraft’s literary reputation and respectability act as justification and validation for Gordon’s artistic journey from theater to film. Lovecraft was
used to validate Gordon’s decision to leave theater in the mid-1980s, and Lovecraft
is used once again to validate this decision for Masters of Horror viewers. The conflict with the Organic Theatre Company over Gordon’s direction of Re-Animator
provides some foundation for Gordon to endorse the horror film over the stage, but
does not deny Gordon the significant prestige which association with the theater
generates.
In “Dreams, Darkness & Damnation,” Gordon validates himself and his oeuvre
through the literary gravitas of Lovecraft, while simultaneously demonstrating a
level of mastery over the author. He argues that “Lovecraft can be very cinematic. It’s

a question of taking the right story. A lot of his stories are very internal and would
not be easy to adapt, but there are a lot of them that are action-packed” (P. Martin,
“Damnation”). By highlighting the difficulty of adapting Lovecraft, Gordon draws
attention to his own recognized success in negotiating these complexities in the
likes of Re-Animator and From Beyond. Elsewhere, Jeffrey Combs similarly grants
Gordon mastery of Lovecraft with his observation that Lovecraft had little investment in his original 1922 story “Herbert West: Re-Animator” (Woodward, “Gordon”). This observation highlights Gordon’s mastery of the text; namely, his ability
to extract success from material the author himself thought disposable.
Gordon draws attention to Lovecraft’s fear of women in both “Dreams, Darkness & Damnation” and his audio commentary, and informs us that this anxiety
materializes all throughout Lovecraft’s work. Gordon thus places the blame for the
inherent misogyny of “Dreams in the Witch House” on Lovecraft’s shoulders and
points out that he himself inserted the single mother character, Frances, into the
story, thus improving on Lovecraft, whose only female character in the original story
was the witch (Gordon, Godden, and Martin). Gordon also exhibits mastery over
Lovecraft by using the inclusion of this female character to transform Ezra Godden’s character Walter into a symbolic manifestation of Lovecraftian anxiety, torn
between binary opposite representations of women as witches and beautiful mothers (Gordon, Godden, and Martin). On another level, by entering into discourse on
the issue, Gordon uses Lovecraft’s fear of women to absolve himself of, or perhaps
artistically validate, the misogyny he has been accused of throughout his career.
Gordon also comments that “Lovecraft had been writing for pulp magazines
and, like Poe, died young and in complete obscurity. Now people are saying that
Lovecraft is the greatest horror writer of the twentieth century” (P. Martin, “Damnation”). A parallel emerges here with the maligned status of horror filmmakers
in the mainstream, a collective to which Gordon himself belongs and a situation
which Masters of Horror strives to remedy. Gordon’s observation thus validates the
purpose of the series and inserts the participating directors within a longer history
of struggling horror artists. More pertinently, Gordon’s comments on Lovecraft’s
recent popularity and prestige draw attention to his own smarts in recognizing the
cinematic value of Lovecraft, as well as his own part in the increased appreciation
of the author. In his “Dreams in the Witch House” commentary, Gordon has the
following exchange with Perry Martin, after describing the efforts of Lovecraft’s
friends and associates to keep stories like 1933’s “Dreams in the Witch House” in
circulation after the author’s death:

Gordon: Thanks to them, people are still, you know, reading Lovecraft
and . . .
Martin: And thanks to you.

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Gordon: Well, to some small degree. I mean, some of the stories were out
of print, like “Re-Animator” was when I did the film, you know, twenty
years ago. (Gordon, Godden, and Martin)

Gordon points out that movies have contributed to enthusiastic critical and scholarly reevaluations of Lovecraft; as a filmmaker heavily associated with Lovecraft,
Gordon thus inserts himself in a movement which has kept Lovecraft’s work alive
and helped stories like “Herbert West: Re-Animator” see print again.
Gordon also points out that Lovecraft purists get angry watching his adaptations because of their frequent nudity (Gordon, Godden, and Martin). While there
is no nudity in Lovecraft, Gordon asserts that he uses nudity to explore the fear of
reproduction and monstrous sexuality running through the Lovecraft oeuvre (Gordon, Godden, and Martin), thus demonstrating discursive mastery over Lovecraft
scholars and other aficionados. However, while he enjoys playing the part of provocateur, the director also suggests that the opposition between himself and the
purists may be decreasing. Reception to “Dreams in the Witch House” at the 2005
H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, was positive, according to Gordon, and many purists felt his episode was the closest in spirit to Lovecraft of all
Gordon’s adaptations, which pleased the director (Gordon, Godden, and Martin).
Gordon also feels himself advancing closer and closer toward a Lovecraftian plane,
citing the moment in his episode when Walter recognizes the dimensional gateway
in his apartment as his most Lovecraftian directorial moment to date, calling it “pure
Lovecraft” (P. Martin, “Damnation”; Gordon, Godden, and Martin). This is perhaps
the most explicit instance of Gordon attempting to genealogize himself alongside
and through his predecessor.18
The self-fashioning that occurs in and around “Dreams in the Witch House” is
actually fairly consistent with recent patterns in Gordon’s work. Much of Gordon’s
recent work shows a strain of self-fashioning intent, and a conscious return toward
both his theatrical and cinematic roots: the Organic Theatre Company was responsible for staging the earliest work of David Mamet, and Gordon returned to Mamet
in 2005 with Edmond; Gordon’s Masters of Horror episodes “Dreams in the Witch
House” and “The Black Cat” continue the director’s courting of Lovecraft and Poe,
respectively; and two of Gordon’s future projects, The Thing on the Doorstep and
House of Re-Animator, mark returns to Lovecraft and, in the case of the latter film,
to the franchise where his film career began.

A B r a z i l i a n D e e r i n C a n a da: L a n d i s a n d H i s H o r r o r Am i g o s
On the cover art adorning the American-release DVD jacket for “Dreams in the
Witch House,” Gordon’s appearance is grim, like a nightmarish mug shot, suggesting

barely contained fury. A number of the photos and stills sprinkled throughout the
special features, often of Gordon at work directing on previous film sets, contain
similar posturing on Gordon’s part. This aggressive posturing is appropriate for a
Master of Horror, though somewhat incongruous with the director’s mild-mannered interview style, as well as with some of the observations made by collaborators
throughout the special features, especially those made by Carolyn Purdy-Gordon.19
In sharp contrast with the picture of Gordon gracing the cover of “Dreams in
the Witch House,” the picture of John Landis on the U.S. cover of “Deer Woman”
goes for a different quality altogether. Landis is smiling mischievously, even somewhat puckishly. The photos and stills peppered throughout the “Deer Woman” supplementary features similarly reflect Landis’s style of square goofball chic. Furthermore, while Gordon’s interview style is reserved and contained, Landis is animated
and self-consciously wacky. This persona is in tune with Landis’s “Deer Woman,”
which, in turn, is relatively in tune with the bulk of his oeuvre. Landis is, after all,
a comedy director by trade. This incongruity permeates Landis’s participation in
Masters of Horror: his status in relation to the horror genre is ambiguous and uncertain, and his self-fashioning in large part acknowledges and responds to this generic
anxiety and uncertainty, though neither is ever completely exorcised.
Landis’s comedy catalog includes the cult classics Kentucky Fried Movie (1977),
National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), and The Blues Brothers (1980), as well as
broader mainstream fare like Trading Places (1983), Spies Like Us (1985), The Three
Amigos (1986), and Coming To America (1988), starring high-profile comedic actors
like Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and Eddie Murphy. In comparison, his horror
output is limited to the popular An American Werewolf in London and the vampire
movie Innocent Blood (1992), both of which are often seen more as comedies than
horror movies. Landis’s season-one Masters episode “Deer Woman,” written by his
son Max Landis, fits in with the director’s previous horror ventures by incorporating plenty of humor, and Landis, like Gordon, plays to his own creative strengths
throughout.20 In addition to his output as director, Landis has also appeared as
an actor in a number of films, including movies by his fellow Masters of Horror:
Spontaneous Combustion (1990) for Tobe Hooper; Psycho IV, Sleepwalkers (1992),
The Stand, and Quicksilver Highway (1997) for Mick Garris; and the forthcoming
Parasomnia (2009) for William Malone.21
In “Animal Hooves: An Interview with John Landis” (2006), the title of which
is obviously a play on Landis’s seminal Animal House, Landis highlights and draws
attention to the ambiguity of his position as a Master of Horror, but simultaneously
fetishizes his status as outsider. He muses:
How would I describe my episode? Silly. The premise of the film, it’s utterly
ridiculous, and I like that. But I think it’s a problem when the monster
becomes a joke, because the horror film stands and falls on whether the

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monsters are scary. Even in Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein, which is
probably the best monster comedy, the monsters are treated with great
respect. And the approach is similar to “Deer Woman,” because that is what
interests me, to be as realistic as possible dealing with an essentially preposterous subject. (P. Martin, “Hooves”)
Landis embraces his position as outsider while using this outsider status to
critique the horror form, as he does above, which has the effect of privileging his
insight and thus affording him an appropriate level of mastery. Also, by citing Abbot
& Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Landis aligns his own film “Deer Woman”
alongside that seminal horror comedy feature.
Elsewhere, Landis states that “Deer Woman” is “very much influenced” by the
classic Jacques Tourneur horror film Cat People (1942) (P. Martin, “Hooves”). Both
revolve around female monster-figures who are heavily sexualized, and Landis’s film
features a scene in which his protagonist Dwight Faraday (Brian Benben) believes
he is being stalked down a dark street, in homage to a similar scene in Cat People.
While the corresponding scene in Cat People ends with the engineered shock of a
bus screeching into frame, the equivalent scene in “Deer Woman” ends with genuine
peril, with a mugger bursting into frame to assault the hero. According to Landis,
“it’s not a false scare, it’s a real scare” (P. Martin, “Hooves”). Landis thus exhibits
mastery over Tourneur with his “real scare” as opposed to Tourneur’s “false scare,”
though the foundations of this distinction (what makes the former false and the
latter real) are debatable.
In addition to aligning “Deer Woman” with Cat People and Abbot & Costello
Meet Frankenstein, Landis also refers to his own An American Werewolf in London throughout, thus genealogizing “Deer Woman” alongside American Werewolf
and, by association, American Werewolf alongside Landis’s other illustrious horror/
comedy-horror predecessors. Furthermore, Landis uses American Werewolf and its
success and reputation to justify creative decisions made for “Deer Woman,” and to
validate his ambiguous, incongruous place as a Master of Horror:
I don’t consider An American Werewolf a comedy. It is a horror film. It’s
pretty funny, but the humour is used really to heighten the horror. Again the
approach is to be as realistic as possible, dealing with a preposterous subject.
To startle someone is fun but it’s not necessarily what I like to do. I’m not
interested in going Boo! It takes more skill to make them care about the fate
of the characters, to create genuine suspense, to create suspension of disbelief,
[to] take something that’s not real and to make it real. (P. Martin, “Hooves”)

“Deer Woman” contains probably the most explicit instance of intertextual
self-referencing in the entire Masters of Horror series. In a scene in which Faraday
defends his absurd hunch on the murder case before his superior, he refers to brutal
animal attacks in London in 1981 to back him up. Interestingly, Landis says he was
reluctant to include this in-joke, saying, “You know what I didn’t like? The reference
to An American Werewolf in London. I went ‘Oh that’s obnoxious, we have to take it
out!’ and Mick Garris said ‘No, that’s great, people like that stuff, keep it in!’ So it’s
in, but it was written by Max, it’s in because of Mick” (P. Martin, “Hooves”). Landis
reads this self-referential in-joke as “obnoxious” and displaces responsibility for it
onto his producer and his son, but the moment still serves to validate Landis’s “Deer
Woman” through the prestige of American Werewolf.
While footage from and references to the Masters’ previous films are used in
the special features to demonstrate their subjects’ mastery of the genre, works by
other artists are also heavily referenced, to place the Masters’ films and oeuvres
within a larger pop-culture canon. We see this self-fashioning motif most obviously
in Gordon’s references both to Lovecraft and his own theatrical pedigree, as well
as his early love of horror movies and William Castle. In the case of Landis, this
is most evident in his attempts to canonize his horror work alongside the likes of
Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Cat People. Landis also attempts to align his
comedy work alongside the output of Hollywood comic luminaries. He considers
Spies Like Us his variation on the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road movie formula,
and Coming to America his variation on the Ernest Lubitsch stylized comedy formula (P. Martin, “Hooves”). The director thus continues a pattern of defining his
own films in relation to critically successful, archetypal Hollywood texts, each with
the dream factory’s requisite dazzle and polish.22
Though he highlights the incongruity of his Horror Master status with his
wider body of work as a comedy director, Landis nonetheless embraces this status
and uses his outsider position to advance his cause. He comments that “I’ve made
22 pictures but most of them are not horror films, so I think it’s amusing to be called
a Master of Horror . . . These guys have quite a body of work of horror films and
I’m flattered to be in their company” (P. Martin, “Hooves”). Landis goes on to praise
some of the other season-one episodes directed by his colleagues:
Stuart Gordon’s is really one of the better Lovecraft adaptations I’ve ever seen.
I’ve seen Mick’s, I’ve seen Don’s, I’ve seen some of John Carpenter’s, and I’ve
seen all of Dario’s. They’re really different. Joe Dante, he took advantage of
this opportunity to do something important. I took advantage of this opportunity to do something silly. (P. Martin, “Hooves”)

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Landis celebrates the company he is keeping and draws attention to the diversity of material on display. However, he also draws attention to the even greater
difference and distance between himself and his fellow Masters, by pointing out
that he used the opportunity “to do something silly” (P. Martin, “Hooves”). This is
reinforced visually in the featurette by a cut to one of the more ludicrous moments
in Landis’s film (P. Martin, “Hooves”). Also, while Landis praises the diversity of
texts produced by his colleagues, elsewhere he asserts his own originality over the
other efforts, saying he chose the Deer Woman as his monster because “I knew that
a lot of the guys would be doing serial killers and maniacs” (P. Martin, “Hooves”).
Thus, while Landis praises the differences between the various Masters of Horror
episodes, he also distances his own feature from a body of episodes, which, by his
account, draw from the same slasher myth pool. Landis thus fashions himself as
exotic outsider from the position of privileged insider.
Through fetishizing and reinforcing this status as exotic outsider, Landis sets
up a certain critical distance between himself and the horror genre. This position
permits Landis to be a Master of Horror while also giving him license to critique the
genre from the outside, as a Master of non-Horror unwilling to regurgitate serial
killer and maniac clichés. Ironically, the domain of serial killers is the very territory
which Landis himself visits in his season-two Masters episode, “Family” (2006).
One convention which Landis does critique through “Deer Woman” is the
inherent misogyny of the genre. Landis expresses particular satisfaction with a
scene in “Deer Woman” where an American Indian tells Faraday the myth of the
Deer Woman, only to then dismiss it as a misogynistic legend (P. Martin, “Hooves”).
Landis’s film thus draws from horror movie conventions in which the monster is
gendered feminine—films that equate women and power with monstrosity—while
simultaneously deconstructing the misogyny of not only these films but of the genre
in general. Landis’s approach, though perhaps slighter than my analysis has given it
credit for, proves an interesting counterpoint to Gordon, who uses a witch, another
monstrous female, as the villain of his episode with little critical or ironic commentary on the matter.
One of the more interesting self-fashioning gestures performed by Landis in
the making of the episode was the hiring of his son Max as screenwriter. Landis, in
addition to fashioning himself as a Master of Horror, uses the occasion to genealogize his nineteen-year-old son, in his professional scriptwriting debut, alongside the
show’s prolific writers. The gallery of scribes responsible for the episodes includes
the likes of Dennis Paoli, Sam Hamm, and David J. Schow, while the pool of source
material from which some of the episodes were adapted includes work by the likes
of Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Clive Barker, and Joe R. Lansdale.23 Landis also
appears to be fashioning his son after his own image. Most significantly, Landis
wrote the original screenplay for American Werewolf in 1969 at the age of nineteen,

while his son wrote the screenplay for “Deer Woman” at the same age. The echoes
do not end there. Landis entered the industry at a relatively young age and worked
as a gopher on the major studio war comedy Kelly’s Heroes (1970).24 Likewise, Max
received his first professional industry gig (on Masters of Horror) while fairly young,
under his father’s tutelage. Just as his father’s movie directing-writing debut was a
monster comedy about a rampaging gorilla called Schlock (1973), Max’s professional
scriptwriting debut was a monster comedy about a killer with deer hooves. Finally,
just as his first project Schlock was financed by a benevolent uncle, who gave the
fledging director $50,000, Landis benevolently helped set up his son’s first creative
endeavor in the film business.
Max Landis is one of many guests who appear on “Working with a Master:
John Landis” (2006) to praise Landis, alongside actors Brian Benben, Robert Loggia, Jenny Agutter, Don Rickles, and Dan Aykroyd, special-effects make-up artist
Rick Baker, and horror-fantasy luminary Forest J. Ackerman. While the likes of
Combs, Crampton, Foree, and Yuzna (on the Gordon featurette) possess strong
horror genre credentials, only Baker, as American Werewolf’s special-effects makeup mastermind, and Ackerman, celebrated editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland
(1958–1983), have similarly strong genre connections on the equivalent Landis featurette. Combs and Foree practically drip iconic genre history (Foree is best known
for his role in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead [1978]), but the case is less so with the
likes of Rickles and Aykroyd, so participants are forced to work harder to establish
Landis’s horror credentials.
Aykroyd identifies Landis as an avid reader of horror magazine Fangoria
(1979–present), while Ackerman makes reference to Landis’s love of Bela Lugosi
and Boris Karloff (Woodward, “Landis”). Much is made, naturally, of An American
Werewolf in London. The feature opens with the following tantalizing extract from
Landis’s original script for American Werewolf, dated from 1969: “The metamorphosis from man into beast is not an easy one. As bone and muscle bend and reform
themselves, the body suffers lacerating pain. We can actually see David’s flesh move”
(Woodward, “Landis”). Much is also made of Innocent Blood, his work on Michael
Jackson’s American Werewolf–inspired music video for Thriller (1983), and his contribution to another self-fashioning anthology project, Twilight Zone: The Movie
(1983). However, the treatment of Twilight Zone is somewhat selective: Aykroyd and
Baker talk about the opening scare prologue featuring Aykroyd and Albert Brooks,
but no mention is made of Landis’s controversial story segment, which led to the
accidental deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two young child actors, an incident
which saw Landis tried for involuntary manslaughter.25
While American Werewolf star Agutter says, “I don’t really think of him as
being a horror movie director” (Woodward, “Landis”), Benben argues, though not
with great conviction, that “John’s made his bones in the horror genre, for sure, you

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know, the horror slash comedy genre. I think, you know, I think he’s up there with
all those guys” (Woodward, “Landis”). Ultimately, the “Working with a Master”
featurette struggles to paint a convincing portrait of Landis as a horror director,
though all participants sing their director’s praises accordingly.
In the Gordon featurettes, footage and stills are shown from the likes of ReAnimator, Dolls, From Beyond, The Pit and the Pendulum, Castle Freak, Dagon, and
even Robot Jox. Footage and stills on the Landis featurettes come predominantly
from Schlock, American Werewolf naturally, and Innocent Blood. Brief snippets are
shown from his more popular comedies, while in the case of lesser comedies like
Oscar (1991), Beverly Hills Cop 3 (1994), and The Stupids (1996), we see only fleeting poster art. Like Twilight Zone: The Movie, Innocent Blood occupies an awkward
position in the Landis featurettes. As a horror comedy—one of only a few Landis
features with horror content—it is required to flesh out and support the argument
that John Landis is a Master of Horror. At the same time, its position is awkward
because the film was not particularly successful.
Landis advocates for Innocent Blood, arguing that it was “a little too out there for
people” (P. Martin, “Hooves”). The director discusses the film on “Animal Hooves”
right after discussing American Werewolf. Referring to American Werewolf’s horror
comedy formula, he states that “I did it once more on Innocent Blood” (P. Martin,
“Hooves”). Landis thus strategically aligns the less-successful latter film alongside
the more-successful former film, in hope that some of the former’s residual prestige
will rub off on the latter. This echoes some of the promotional material for Innocent
Blood, which declared, “The legendary director that brought you National Lampoon’s
Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places,
and Coming to America brings you the dark comedy horror film from the undead”
(IMDb, “Innocent Blood”). Landis’s associates, however, are not particularly generous toward the film: Max Landis says the film is “not one of his most successful
movies,” while Don Rickles is less diplomatic, calling the film a “giant bomb” (Woodward, “Landis”).26
Landis’s feature film career degenerated over the course of the 1990s thanks to
the likes of Innocent Blood, Oscar, Beverly Hills Cop 3, The Stupids, and Blues Brothers
2000 (1998). As such, the opportunity for self-fashioning presented by Masters of
Horror would have held considerable appeal for Landis.27 The series also presents a
valuable opportunity for Landis to step outside the realm of comedy: the director
laments in his interview featurette that he has been pigeonholed as a comedy director (P. Martin, “Hooves”). In the aftermath of “Deer Woman” and his season-two
episode “Family,” Landis is currently attached to a project in development called
Ghoulishly Yours, William M. Gaines, a biopic of the EC Comics publisher responsible for titles like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror (both 1950–1955); this suggests that the Masters of Horror experience has enabled Landis to break away from

the constraints of genre typecasting. Furthermore, just as Gordon’s recent work
harks back to an earlier phase of his career, we can elucidate similar self-fashioning
intent from Landis’s involvement with Masters of Horror. The shooting conditions
for “Deer Woman” closely resembled the shooting conditions for his debut feature
Schlock. Schlock was shot over the course of ten days in, according to the director,
the “hottest summer in California history” (P. Martin, “Hooves”). Likewise, each
Masters of Horror episode had a tight shooting schedule of only ten days.28

B u l l s h i t o r D e e r s h i t: I n t e n t i o n s, T e n s i o n s, Q u e st i o n s
In an ideal world, each episode of Masters of Horror would attest to its
director’s mastery of horror, but in most cases these demonstrations of mastery are
compromised. Interestingly, four issues of a Masters of Horror comic book series
accompanied the show, capitalizing on horror fandom across both media. Horror
comics are currently in vogue, and a number of companies have adapted horror
movie franchises into comic book form. For example, Wildstorm, a division of DC
Comics, has produced comics based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare
on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th. Wildstorm editor Ben Abernathy insists that “in
comics, we’re not constrained by Hollywood concerns like budgets or locations, only
by our imaginations” (Dickholtz 8).29
Unfortunately, the Masters of Horror themselves are constrained by Hollywood concerns. The legitimacy of each director’s claim to the title of Master of
Horror falls upon a larger body of work, which the Masters of Horror episodes complement. It is this body of work which the special features strive to pay tribute to,
while simultaneously feeding off this work’s intertextual energy. The extra-textual
supplements—especially the director interviews and tribute featurettes, but also
on-set cast interviews, making-of shorts, and commentaries—aid veteran directors
in historicizing themselves as legitimate artists. These paratexts also allow emerging directors, as well as filmmakers on the fringe of the genre, to insert themselves
within this evolving genealogy of Masters. Gordon, a noted horror director who
has gone largely unrecognized in the mainstream, is formally canonized as a Master
of his craft, while Landis, a filmmaker pigeonholed as a director of comedies with
broad appeal, uses the project to stabilize his difficult position in the genre.
This, at least, is the idealized scenario. Unfortunately, the title of Master proves
to be somewhat self-sabotaging. The DVD project attempts to address the maligning of horror in respectable critical circles, but amid this celebration of the genre
there are unintentional disparaging voices, voices which undermine the thrust of the
enterprise. Landis himself is one of those voices, dismissing much of the genre as
the domain of “serial killers and maniacs” (P. Martin, “Hooves”) even as he pursues

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recognition as a horror auteur. In his “Dreams in the Witch House” commentary,
Gordon states, “I don’t like these movies where you’ve got obnoxious teenagers getting slaughtered by a guy in a hockey mask” (Gordon, Godden, and Martin). Gordon’s dismissive gesture does little to promote the genre, falling once again upon stereotypes. Meanwhile, Landis’s leading man Brian Benben points out (in an on-set
interview) that “the script had a lot of texture for a horror episode” (Altherr). This
statement, while highlighting the deconstructive texture that Landis and his son
bring to the episode, undermines the overall intention of the series to demonstrate
the genre’s inherent sophistication.30
The maligning of the genre and the vague criteria for canonization as a Master
of Horror call into question the intended audience of the project. Are the Masters of
Horror DVD special features aimed at engaging horror aficionados or mainstream
consumers? Is the series preaching to the converted or converting the unconverted?
The “Dreams in the Witch House” and “Deer Woman” extras would hold considerable appeal for fans of Gordon and Landis, who would already be familiar with
the directors’ career trajectories, would recognize snippets from their movies, and
would recognize the likes of Combs and Crampton from these films. At the same
time, these special features are partly calibrated toward audiences who are unfamiliar with their work, to educate them on these auteurs, to validate their canonization
as Masters, and to help viewers of a more mainstream persuasion justify watching
a horror program. However, the interiorized maligning of the genre and the loaded
nature of the Master denomination invite discriminating viewers, both inside and
outside horror fandom, to interrogate the Master denomination on the basis of tensions within the self-fashioning.
Landis stresses his position as exotic outsider while using the genre credibility
of American Werewolf to canonize himself alongside more-established practitioners of the horror genre. Gordon fashions his persona by courting association with
Lovecraft and emphasizing his theatrical pedigree. However, their self-fashioning is
ripe with contradictory gestures, transforming the documentary/behind-the-scenes
supplements into sites of tension between these conflicting impulses. Though Landis and the makers of these featurettes celebrate his displacement from the horror
genre, at the same time they must nonetheless validate Landis’s position as a Master
of Horror. They ultimately strain in doing so, as the awkward treatment of Innocent Blood and half-hearted handling of Twilight Zone: The Movie attest. The latter
in particular proves problematic: in shying away from the subject matter, neither
Landis nor the makers of these featurettes project a completely honest portrait of
Landis as an artist. While Gordon stresses his theatrical background, he must also
maintain a distance from it to avoid shining a disparaging light upon his horror
filmography. Lovecraft is used to bridge that distance, and also to validate Gordon’s
move from theater to film, but his association with Lovecraft likewise proves a site

of contradictory impulses: Gordon reveres his Master predecessor while simultaneously attempting to exercise mastery over him, a gesture symptomatic of Harold
Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” Ultimately, these self-sabotaging gestures destabilize
the scaffolding of the Master label.
While each director is clearly engaged in self-fashioning activity, we must question to what extent they are mastering their own personae or having it mastered for
them. As indicated earlier, DVD paratexts are both autographic and allographic,
and the self-fashioning gestures of the directors are subject to behind-the-scenes
manipulation. In the director interviews, each director talks the audience through
their careers and their passions, but this dialogue is shaped by the featurette directors, series producers, and so forth. This binary opposition—the filmmaker as both
active subject of the featurette and passive subject within/to the featurette, the Master subject and the Mastered subject—does hint at a level of diplomatic subordination on these directors’ parts.
The Masters of Horror participate in and benefit from this endeavor, but Mick
Garris does so especially: each successfully orchestrated entry into the Master canon
strengthens and secures his own self-appointed position as Master of that canon,
Master of ceremonies, Master of the Masters of Horror. However, the Masters and
their Master are not the only beneficiaries—creative and commercial—of Masters
of Horror. Starz Media/IDT Entertainment benefits from the endeavor, as does
Starz Media Entertainment/Anchor Bay, an imprint already well known for its horror catalog. Perry Martin and Frank H. Woodward also benefit from the enterprise:
Garris himself was a film documentarian early in his career, producing making-of
documentaries for the likes of Dante’s The Howling, Carpenter’s The Fog (1980),
David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1980), and Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II (1981); the
Masters of Horror special features, thus, offer their makers the opportunity to fashion themselves after Garris.
Showtime also benefits from their involvement with the series. A Variety review
of the series’ debut proclaimed, “Although Showtime has waded into the competition to launch prestige dramas, there’s something to be said for recognizing the
many subscribers who still look hopefully to pay TV for good old-fashioned helpings of nudity and violence” (Lowry). This review praises Showtime for embracing
and catering to the horror demographic, while—much like Landis, Gordon, and
Benben—simultaneously disparaging the horror genre itself. In another Variety
piece, Denise Martin notes that “Showtime will shell out more money than some of
the B-movie auteurs are used to getting” (D. Martin). Not only is this observation
inaccurate, it generalizes and perpetuates that all the participating directors, and by
extension all horror directors and horror movies, are B-grade. Such comments are
at odds with the network’s and the producers’ marketing of the show as both genre
landmark and cultural event.

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In 2008, Masters of Horror migrated from Showtime to NBC and was reinvented under the title Fear Itself. Garris was forced to resign from proceedings due to
behind-the-scenes complications, but both Gordon and Landis remained onboard
and contributed episodes, “Eater” (2008) and “In Sickness and in Health” (2008),
respectively. The only other Masters to remain onboard were second-season recruits
Brad Anderson, Ernest Dickerson, and Rob Schmidt. Max Landis also served as a
writer on the new series. Fear Itself was produced by Lions Gate, a company that in
recent years has garnered credibility with horror aficionados (particularly those of
the younger set) through its association with the Hostel and Saw (2004) franchises.
The presence of Darren Lynn Bousman—director of Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006),
and Saw IV (2007)—as one of the show’s new recruits serves to accentuate ties
between Lions Gate’s previous horror successes and the new series. However, the
conscious decision not to overemphasize the credentials of the contributing filmmakers this time around seems to indicate an increased awareness of the critical
ambivalence surrounding the Master denomination.
In an essay analyzing the Internet discussion group Horror at Indiana: Horror in Film and Literature (a group briefly cited earlier in this chapter), K. A. Laity
discusses, among other things, the impetus of the group—an impetus that exists,
I would argue, among all aficionados and scholars of the genre “toward creating an
authoritative (hegemonic) view of horror works; however, this political elitism is
constantly challenged by the similarly strong drive toward recognizing, even valorizing, the visceral, and decidedly non-intellectual, qualities as well [. . .] The variability
of any ‘authority’ keeps the field contested” (173–74).
Masters of Horror, I would argue, is an explicit manifestation of this tension
between our desire for hegemonic closure, a sealed and uncontaminated horror elite,
on the one hand, and an open discourse on the other. The unstable criterion for the
title of Master is frustrating, but this lack of authoritative closure is not completely
negative. There are other problems surrounding the series: numerous contradictory
impulses arise and circulate throughout the self-fashioning process, with each director’s orchestrated identity vulnerable to the internalized “signs of its own subversion
and loss” (Greenblatt 9); each episode is compromised in its demonstration of its
Master’s mastery; and the knee-jerk maligning of the genre is ever-present outside
and interiorized within proceedings. However, these tensions ultimately contribute
to a more productive discourse.
With the American horror movie mainstream currently dominated by remakes
of classic American and recent Asian horror films, franchise-expanding sequels,
and exercises in torture porn, the prospect of admired horror directors creating
original material holds considerable appeal. However, a number of issues call into
question the legitimacy of Masters of Horror’s Master denomination, and a number

of conflicting impulses are at play in the self-fashioning of each director. These
impulses materialize predominantly in the show’s special features and paratexts,
which are essential to the self-fashioning process, but also materialize elsewhere.
However, while these self-sabotaging tensions are never completely resolved, their
circulation within and across the texts is ultimately dialectical: they raise important
questions about what constitutes auteurship in the horror genre—a question open
to the academic, the aficionado, and the artist—and how auteurship is established
through extra-textual supplements. Hopefully the Masters of Horror DVD project
and its numerous positive incongruities will contribute to further academic consideration of the horror genre and will expand critical discourse in the field.

N ot e s
1. Some brief background on the program’s DVD history might be useful. The first season’s
episodes were originally released as individual DVDs in the United States, but have subsequently
been re-released in double-feature packs, in two collected volumes each containing six episodes,
and in a deluxe fourteen-disc box set in appropriately gothic mausoleum packaging. As this
considerable effort on the part of Anchor Bay—now Starz Media, after IDT Entertainment
(to which Anchor Bay belonged) was purchased by them in 2006—suggests, the promotion of
horror movie auteurship, for which there is clearly a significant consumer market, is not without
vested material interests or compensation. Second-season episodes have also been released
individually and in collections in the United States, but my focus throughout this paper will be
on first season releases. The Australian-release discs are used in my analyses throughout and
are for the most part identical to the American discs, though there are minor variations. In the
case of “Dreams in the Witch House” (2005) and “Deer Woman” (2005), the discs I will be using
predominantly throughout this chapter, the stills/storyboard galleries, trailers, and DVD Rom
features that accompany the American discs are not present on their Australian equivalents. As
such, these particular features will not be touched upon in this chapter.
2. The Emmy citation, incidentally, is a rather creative promotional use of the accolade. The
show won only one Emmy, for Ed Shearmur’s opening title music.
3. Miike’s controversial episode, “Imprint” (2006), was deemed too horrific to be screened on
U.S. television. The episode was never aired, but has been released on DVD.
4. Actor Brian Benben, in the commentary for John Landis’s “Deer Woman,” jokes during
the bloody opening credits that “this is where you really need a sponge” and muses that there is
“more DNA there than [at] the O.J. trial”; see Brian Benben and Anthony Griffith, commentary,
“Masters of Horror: Deer Woman,” Masters of Horror: Collector’s Edition One (Anchor Bay
Entertainment, 2006).
5. On a side note, it is worth noting the absence of May (2002), House on Haunted Hill
(1999), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), Suspiria (1977), and Audition (1999), among others,
and thus the exclusion of their respective directors.
6. By extension, a number of directors who had participated in Mick Garris’s original
dinners, including Guillermo del Toro, Eli Roth, Tim Sullivan, and Rob Zombie, are not
involved in the series.

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7. Gordon is not alone in his appreciation of Castle. Three of his fellow Masters of
Horror—John Landis, Joe Dante, and William Malone—appear in the documentary Spine
Tingler: The William Castle Story (2008).
8. Gordon also cast actor Guy Rolfe as the benevolent/malevolent doll-maker in his film
Dolls (1987). Rolfe played the villainous Baron Sardonicus in the William Castle film Mr
Sardonicus (1964), a film Gordon talks affectionately about in the Dolls audio commentary.
9. Carpenter directed two of the Body Bags (1993) shorts, while the third is directed by Tobe
Hooper, who makes a more-subdued acting appearance.
10. Shimako Iwai, author of the novel Bokkê, kyôtê from which Miike’s “Imprint” (2006) was
adapted, plays a brutal torturer in “Imprint,” perhaps following in Miike’s footsteps.
11. Significantly, both directors returned for the show’s second season, as did Tobe Hooper,
John Carpenter, Dario Argento, Joe Dante, and of course Mick Garris. On the other hand, Don
Coscarelli, Larry Cohen, John McNaughton, Lucky McKee, William Malone, and Takashi Miike
did not return for the second season; their places were filled by Tom Holland, Ernest Dickerson,
Rob Schmidt, Brad Anderson, Peter Medak, and Norio Tsuruta. Gordon and Landis also
returned for the show’s reinvention under the title Fear Itself (2008).
12. These “Working with a Master” featurettes are typically fawning. For instance, on
“Working with a Master: Stuart Gordon” (2006), Ken Foree calls Gordon “a pioneer” and “an
inventor” while Barbara Crampton proclaims that Gordon “will always take chances and will
always push the envelope”; Frank H. Woodward, dir., “Working with a Master: Stuart Gordon,”
Masters of Horror: Collector’s Edition One (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2006). Meanwhile, on
the featurette “Working with a Master: John Landis” (2006), Landis’s niche as a comedy director
gives interviewees greater license to plant their tongues in their cheeks, particularly comedian
Don Rickles, who jokes that “I don’t know how he skyrocketed to become a director [. . .] He
was a lovely guy then. Now he’s changed, you know, has a few bucks and he sits in his estate and
blows smoke to the mountains”; Frank H. Woodward, “Working with a Master: John Landis,”
Masters of Horror: Collector’s Edition One (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2006). At the same time,
Rickles calls Landis “a very intelligent man,” while Forest J. Ackerman praises the director as “a
real human being” (Woodward, “Landis”).
13. It is worth noting that there are some variations from disc to disc. For instance, “Dreams
in the Witch House” features a special-effects segment, while the Landis episode features old
footage from an episode of Z Channel’s Fantasy Film Festival (1980). In this archival footage, the
young John Landis is interviewed by the young Mick Garris. Landis and Garris discuss Landis’s
National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and preview Landis’s forthcoming The Blues Brothers
(1980), and Landis alludes to another upcoming project, a horror comedy called An American
Werewolf in London (1981). Similar archival interviews also appear on the discs for Garris’s own
“Chocolate” (2005), in which he interviews Roger Corman, and Joe Dante’s “Homecoming”
(2005), in which Garris interviews Dante about his recent film Piranha (1978). These archival
interviews demonstrate the ongoing solidarity between these Masters of Horror.
14. The “audience participation quality” (Woodward, “Gordon”) which Combs alludes to and
the inventive staging of The Game Show (1968) could both be traced in part back to Gordon’s
appreciation of William Castle.
15. Gordon comments in both “Dreams, Darkness & Damnation” (2006) and his audio
commentary that Purdy-Gordon also threatened to divorce him after seeing the finished product
of “Dreams in the Witch House” on the grounds that it was too extreme; Perry Martin, dir.,
“Dreams, Darkness & Damnation: An Interview with Stuart Gordon,” Masters of Horror:
Collector’s Edition One (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2006).

16. During his lifetime Lovecraft’s work was only published in pulp magazines, and the
author died in relative obscurity. However, Lovecraft’s status and respectability have risen over
the course of time and he is now acknowledged as a master storyteller and a luminary of genre
fiction. This reflects the driving force behind Masters of Horror: pulp authors (or auteurs) striving
for recognition and respectability, qualities that Gordon seeks especially through his association
with Lovecraft.
17. Although their ties with Lovecraft are less direct, Castle Freak and the proposed fourth
Re-Animator film, House of Re-Animator, are also derived from the author’s work.
18. Gordon’s constructive use of the DVD commentary proves an interesting counterpoint
to Landis, who declined to do a commentary for “Deer Woman” and who stated in a 2002
interview that “I don’t like those usually” when pressed on the topic of audio commentaries;
Scott Hocking, “The Wolf Man: John Landis,” Region 4.11 (2002): 44–45. Landis has done only
three commentaries, for his early films Schlock (1973) and Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and for
his documentary Slasher (2004). Gordon, meanwhile, has been more prolific in contributing
commentaries to his films. In addition to his “Dreams in the Witch House” commentary, Gordon
has provided commentaries for DVD releases of Dolls, Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986),
Space Truckers (1996), Dagon (2001), King of the Ants (2003), Stuck (2007), and season two’s “The
Black Cat” (2007).
19. Gordon’s wife spends much of the time pointing out her Horror Master husband’s own
aversions to horror. She especially revels in an anecdote about how Gordon “got so woozy that he
had to sit down and put his head between his knees” after their terrier nipped its paw on some
glass and began bleeding (Woodward, “Gordon”). Gordon also “got queasy and wound up not
being able to eat and had to go put his head between his knees” (Woodward, “Gordon”) on the
set of Dolls while having lunch with his wife as grisly make-up was applied to her. The director
proved similarly averse to being with actor Jonathan Fuller in his grisly make-up on the set of
Castle Freak (1995) (Woodward, “Gordon”). Such observations are at odds with the promotional
picture’s image of the director. Gordon himself, in “Dreams, Darkness & Damnation,” owns up
to his cowardly ways, commenting that “I’m like the biggest coward of them all. My wife is always
kidding me about this. There have been times when I’ve had to get up and leave a horror movie
in the middle” (P. Martin, “Damnation”). But Gordon comments further that “I know what scares
me, so that is very helpful, I think, to scaring others” (P. Martin, “Damnation”). Gordon’s own
vulnerability and sensitivity to horror are thus reconceptualized by the director as a positive asset
that contributes to his mastery of the genre.
20. It is worth noting that Masters of Horror is not the first anthology project that Landis
has participated in. Landis was involved, most notoriously, with Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983),
alongside fellow Master of Horror Joe Dante, George Miller, and Steven Spielberg. Warner
Bros. intended to call the film Steven Spielberg Presents The Twilight Zone, which would have
calibrated the self-fashioning aura of the project most heavily in Spielberg’s direction; Spielberg
declined the gesture, perhaps wisely for him given the aftermath of the project (Steven Spielberg’s
Amazing Stories [1985–1987], however, is a rather more explicit example of a filmmaker striving to
mythologize themselves through the collaborative anthology format). For a good overview of the
controversy surrounding Landis’s participation in Twilight Zone: The Movie, see Tony Crawley,
The Steven Spielberg Story (New York: Quill, 1983), 143–49. Another anthology project Landis
participated in was Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), again alongside Dante and several others.
Like Masters of Horror, the results of both projects were somewhat mixed. Stuart Gordon also
expresses appreciation of the Masters of Horror anthology style, having been a fan of television
shows like Twilight Zone (1959–1964) and The Outer Limits (1963–1965) (P. Martin, “Damnation”).

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21. By extension, a number of fellow Masters of Horror appear in Landis’s films: Larry Cohen
appears in Spies Like Us (1985), Joe Dante in Oscar (1991) and Beverly Hills Cop 3 (1994), Dario
Argento in Innocent Blood (1992), and Garris in The Stupids (1996).
22. This activity is not confined to Masters of Horror. Both Gordon and Landis also court
association with their illustrious predecessors and contemporaries outside the Masters of
Horror special features. Gordon, appropriately, waxes lyrical on Lovecraft’s achievements in the
documentary The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision, and Phenomenon of H. P. Lovecraft (2003).
In addition to making appearances in films directed by fellow Masters, Landis has also waxed
lyrical quite prolifically in recent times on the works of other horror and fantasy figures. Over
the past few years, he has contributed to documentaries on Mario Bava, Edgar G. Ulmer, Val
Lewton, Ray Harryhausen, and Forest J. Ackerman, among others. Both Gordon and Landis also
make appearances in the recent documentaries Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story and Dead
On: The Life and Cinema of George A. Romero (2008). Carpenter, Argento, and Garris also appear
in the Romero documentary while, as mentioned earlier, Dante and Malone appear in the Castle
tribute. Another recent documentary Landis participates in is even closer to home: Beware the
Moon: Remembering “An American Werewolf in London” (2008).
23. But while the series draws on material from the likes of Lovecraft, Barker, and Matheson,
this material is used in service of the directors and their self-fashioning, rather than the directors
working in service of the material. While Max Landis gains recognition for his participation in
the project, his work is carried out in service of his father’s self-fashioning (and his father in turn
does not hesitate to extend the horizons of his own authorship/auteurship by pointing out his
own minor polish on the script). An obvious point of comparison here would be a recent TV
series inspired by Masters of Horror called Masters of Science Fiction (2007), in which sciencefiction authors—such as Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein, and Walter Mosley—are the
“Masters” of the form rather than the directors adapting their work. This is not the case with
Masters of Horror, where authorship (or, more precisely, auteurship) is reserved for the director.
24. Landis also worked as a stuntman on movie sets in Europe, including the set of Once
Upon a Time in the West (1968), a film co-written by fellow Master of Horror Dario Argento.
25. An interesting aside: Baker mentions that originally he and Landis were to feature in
the opening segment (Woodward, “Landis”). This jokey gesture would have been an interesting
instance of self-fashioning on both their parts, especially for Landis in light of the notoriety the
movie ultimately earned him.
26. As an indication of the film’s maligned position in the Landis canon, the film currently
holds a 5.2 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 5.8 rating on IMDB, and a C grade on Box Office Mojo.
By comparison, the more popular American Werewolf scores 7.4, 7.4, and B, respectively, on these
popular Web sites.
27. In addition to seeking auteur recognition for himself in the horror genre, Landis may well
be seeking wider recognition for directors in general across all genres. In the Fantasy Film Festival:
Mick Garris Interviews John Landis (1980) segment, Landis complains: “It’s an odd thing with the
critics. I don’t think they know what they’re talking about most of the time . . . A case in point
is a movie now out called Coal Miner’s Daughter, which is directed by a friend named Michael
Apted. It’s a wonderful movie, it really is, and all the reviews praise Sissy Spacek’s performance
& Tommy Lee Jones, rightfully so because they’re wonderful, and very few of them say anything
about Michael”; Steven A. Wacker, “Fantasy Film Festival: Mick Garris Interviews John Landis,”
Masters of Horror: Collector’s Edition One (Z Channel, 1980).
28. Having said that, Landis—after working on big-budget Hollywood popcorn movies for
so long—is unable to do justice to the tight budget and short shoot, especially compared to some

of the other directors (Gordon, Takashi Miike, and Don Coscarelli, for example) more recently
accustomed to low-tech filmmaking. It is worth noting that Gordon’s and Landis’s conscious
returns to former artistic territory are by no means isolated. For example, Tobe Hooper is
currently in pre-production on From a Buick 8, which will be Hooper’s third adaptation of
a Stephen King text: his previous King adaptations are Salem’s Lot (1979) and The Mangler
(1995). The project is being produced by Mick Garris, who is also directing an adaptation of
King’s Bag of Bones; in an artistic flirtation reminiscent of Gordon and Lovecraft, Garris has
courted association with King through Sleepwalkers (1992), The Stand (1994), The Shining (1997),
Quicksilver Highway (1997), Riding the Bullet (2004), and Desperation (2006). Meanwhile, one
of Dario Argento’s recent films, La Terza Madre (2007, aka Mother of Tears), completes the
director’s Three Mothers trilogy that began with Suspiria (1977) and continued with Inferno
(1980), and Argento’s next film, Giallo (2009), takes the director back to his giallo roots. These
are just three instances of horror directors actively fashioning, or re-fashioning, their personae by
reengaging with earlier material.
29. The Masters of Horror comic series adapted Gordon’s episode into comic book form,
as well as Coscarelli’s episode “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” (2005). The Masters
comics are on the whole lacking in texture, and Wildstorm’s subsequent cancellation of their
aforementioned monthly horror titles suggests that the medium, though not constrained in
terms of imagination, cannot capture the fundamentally cinematic quality of Leatherface & Co’s
adventures.
30. Showtime’s decision not to screen Takashi Miike’s “Imprint” also damages the veneer
of the show. While on the one hand it highlights the extreme content of Miike’s episode
and validates his status as a Master (and valorizes him over his American colleagues, whose
episodes were not too extreme for broadcast), the gesture is also an emasculating one: Miike is
emasculated of his Master status by having his episode banned from broadcast.

I l lu s o ry “Au r a s” a n d t h e “G r i n d h o u s e E x p e r i e n c e”
In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter
Benjamin posits cinema as a nexus of scientific, aesthetic, economic, and political
practices that effectively sublimate bourgeois conceptualizations of a work’s “aura” to
a process of simulation that ultimately “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” and “authenticity” (224). This formulation, however, meets
its postmodern inversion in one of contemporary U.S. horror cinema’s more conspicuous trends—the application of digital technology as a means of reconstructing
an idealized, historically specific viewing experience marked, visually, by the material conditions of distressed celluloid and, audibly, by the pop and hiss indicative of
damaged analogue soundtracks. An increasingly popular conceit, as evidenced in
the films of directors such as Rob Zombie and Alexandre Aja, this digital manipulation places their films into a critical, nostalgic, and meta-cinematic dialogue with
low-budget U.S. horror and exploitation films of the 1970s, revealing a desire to
recapture, albeit in the most superficial and paradoxical ways, attributes connected
with antiquated modes of cinematic exhibition and reception.1 Consequently, in its
fetishization of an imaginary “authenticity,” contemporary U.S. horror cinema’s affinity for imitating and/or reimagining the “look” and “feel” of an increasingly obsolete
viewing experience conjures up the ghost of Benjamin’s already immaterial “aura,”
complete with the ritualistic, authoritative, and hierarchical structures that allegedly
vanished with the emergence of art’s technological reproducibility.
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Of these recent exercises in cinematic nostalgia, Robert Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse (2007) emerges as perhaps the most metacinematic and
overtly aestheticized. Supplemented by a compilation of bogus satirical trailers
directed by Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rob Zombie, the majority
of Grindhouse is comprised of two truncated features: Robert Rodriguez’s archetypal zombie splatterfest, Planet Terror, and Quentin Tarantino’s meta-cinematic
paean to B-movie muscle car flicks and low-budget proto-slasher films, Death Proof.
Together, Rodriguez and Tarantino endeavor to reproduce an increasingly obsolete
viewing experience for contemporary cineplex audiences. Specifically, their ambitious collaboration aims to replicate the historically, technologically, and geographically specific “feel” of viewing exploitation films, often in the form of damaged or
incomplete prints, within a spatially and temporally specific locale, namely the
derelict, often financially imperiled, urban theaters that “flourished” in the 1960s
and 1970s before slowly vanishing from the North American landscape with the
emergence and proliferation of video cassettes and cable television channels. Far too
impoverished to compete with the emergence of multiplexes boasting numerous
large screens, increasingly sophisticated sound systems, and the support of major
studios, these smaller, often independently owned movie theaters booked such
marginalized fare as European art films, soft-core erotica, Italian cannibal films,
spaghetti westerns, Asian martial arts extravaganzas, and sloppily constructed genre
pictures ranging from biker films and blaxploitation features to splatter films and
“Women in Prison” movies. In other words, out of sheer economic necessity, grindhouse theaters screened works that their wealthier, corporate-managed competitors
would never consider booking out of a fear of offending a substantial percentage of
the middle-class market share they quickly came to dominate. As Jane Mills notes,
grindhouse cinema offered: “pure exploitation joy [. . .] Kung Fu, Sex, Revenge,
Murder, Blood Gorged Frames, Fast Cars, Fast Women, and a pumping pulsing
soundtrack that makes your dick or nipples hard” (para. 26). Consequently, these
decaying urban theaters catered to audiences hungry for films created, in the words
of Ephraim Katz, “with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit, but with
an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques
emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product” (446). Additionally, due to
the economic constraints governing their operation, these inner-city venues, like
the prints they screened, evidenced varying degrees of disrepair. Indeed, the venues’
shabby confines contributed to the overall viewing experience, attracting eclectic
audiences of die-hard cinephiles looking for “edgier” films with controversial or sensationalistic subject matter.
By their own admission, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino are filmmakers very much inspired by their own grindhouse experiences. Works like El
Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), and Once Upon

a Time in Mexico (2003) illustrate the influence of spaghetti westerns and goresoaked horror flicks on Robert Rodriguez’s highly stylized vision. Similarly, Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic output wears its grindhouse trappings on its metaphorical
sleeve; 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, for instance, owes a pronounced debt to Ringo Lam’s
violent crime drama, City on Fire (Long hu feng yun, 1987), while the aesthetics of
1970s blaxploitation films inform both Pulp Fiction (1994) and Jackie Brown (1997).
Famously, the two features Tarantino directed immediately prior to his contribution
to Grindhouse, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), provide a veritable
checklist of stylistic and narratological trappings common to exploitation genres,
from the choreographed mayhem of the chambara eiga, or samurai film, to the ultraviolence of gritty rape-revenge sagas.
Illustrative of the impact of exploitation films upon Robert Rodriguez’s
and Quentin Tarantino’s creative sensibilities, Grindhouse marks one of the more
remarkable, as well as one of the more paradoxical genre experiments in recent
years. As contemporary filmmakers working within the Hollywood system, their
gestures toward reproducing the “grindhouse experience” certainly seems suspect,
especially if one understands the “grindhouse experience” as dependent upon both
the spatial and temporal specificity of the film’s exhibition and the physical materiality of distressed celluloid. Furthermore, if, as Walter Benjamin claims, the “criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production” in the age of its
mechanical reproducibility, then Rodriguez and Tarantino’s attempt to simulate the
“aura” of grindhouse cinema is a futile project from the very start. In the paragraphs
to follow, this chapter examines Grindouse as a text that deploys cutting-edge digital technologies to (re)produce a viewing experience with which only a fraction of
the film’s vast audience can directly relate. Using Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s
contribution to Grindhouse, as a case study, I will posit that structural (i.e., visual,
aural, narratological) logics informing Rodriguez’s and Tarantino’s mammoth cinematic venture exist to produce rather than stimulate nostalgia. Lastly, through a
close reading to two of Death Proof’s most violent sequences, this study interrogates
whether the film’s carnage functions as merely a fetishistic celebration of violence for
violence’s sake, or whether a potentially progressive social critique can be pried from
the gruesome marriages of flesh and steel.

printing presses had already jeopardized the “uniqueness” of objets d’art, from ceramics to books and printed illustrations. Nevertheless, as Walter Benjamin deftly illustrates in his groundbreaking essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” photography and its inevitable spawn, the cinema, provided new
and increasingly popular avenues by which artists could engage creatively with
their world without being permanently “imbedded” within a “fabric of tradition”
or dependent upon a “presence” made manifest by the confluence, during a specific
time and within a given space, of the singular spectator and the unique work of art.
In this sense, viewing a photograph or watching a film differs from visiting an art
gallery or attending a play. “In the theater,” Benjamin claims, “one is well aware of
the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusory. There is
no such place for the movie scene that is being shot” (232). In other words, like a
painting that evokes reverence or awe as a result of its “authenticity” (its existence
as a valued/invaluable one-of-a-kind cultural artifact), the performance by an actor
before her audience is unique; it cannot be performed in exactly the same way twice.
As an art form largely contingent upon its mechanical reproducibility, cinema further dissipates the concept of the aura through the process of editing and its impact
upon the spectator’s understanding of the mise-en-scène. Since its “illusory nature” is
“of the second degree, the result of cutting” (232), the film actor’s performance differs significantly from that of the stage actor. Mediated by the camera and variably
manipulated during post-production, the film actor’s performance—and, hence, her
impact upon her audience—diverges from that of the stage actor in that spectator
“need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman,
the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance” (228).
For Benjamin, film’s eradication of the “aura” constitutes a crucial transformative
moment in the history of art and visual representation. Motion pictures do not
share painting’s ritualistic value—the notion that one must go to a specific museum
to view a certain painting from an individual’s private collection. Films, by contrast,
are created to be reproduced.2
In their attempt to replicate the “grindhouse experience,” Rodriguez and Tarantino effect a curious reversal of Benjamin’s withering aura in the age of art’s mechanical reproducibility. More specifically, they deploy several key strategies to evoke the
“tone” and “feel” of grindhouse cinema. They mimic the narrative conceits of easily
recognizable exploitation film genres. In the case of Planet Terror, Rodriguez creates a zombie/splatter film in the tradition of George Romero’s Dead franchise and
Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979), complete with clever in-jokes and intertextual references aimed at viewers “in the know.” Similarly, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof
evidences an avid cineaste’s knowledge of the cult genres he skillfully intertwines—
most notably the high-octane car chase / “crash ’em up” film (e.g., Peter Yates’s Bullit
[1968], Dirty Mary Crazy Larry [1974], and Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 [1975]),

and the ubiquitous splatter film/ultra-violent rape-revenge narrative (e.g., Meir
Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave [1978] and Abel Ferrara’s Ms .45 [1981]). Furthermore,
through strategic technological manipulation of their films’ footage during postproduction, a process facilitated by simple special-effects tools available in most
high-end digital editing suites, Rodriguez and Tarantino (as well as the directors of
Grindhouse’s faux trailers) simulate the material conditions of distressed celluloid.
Thus, in addition to removing random frames and excising passages of their short
features to suggest the inadvertent absence of crucial film reels, Rodriguez and
Tarantino adorn their work’s mise-en-scène with intentional scratches and splices,
overexposures, and the random insertion of similarly damaged stock footage. Even
the film’s digital soundtrack is meticulously mixed so that artificial pops, crackles,
hisses, and awkward voice-overs imitate the sound of a poor analogue recording.
Rodriguez and Tarantino mobilize these computer-generated embellishments to
create the illusion of “authenticity,” the impression that what appears on screen
approximates the “look” and, perhaps more problematically, the “feel” of attending a
grindhouse theater.
It is precisely through these specific optical and auditory illusions that Rodriguez and Tarantino conjure up the ghost of Benjamin’s already immaterial “aura,”
complete with the ritualistic and authoritative structures that allegedly vanished
with the emergence of art’s technological reproducibility. By directly linking their
film’s aesthetic with the experience of watching damaged motion pictures within
North American grindhouse theaters, Rodriguez and Tarantino invest their work
with the task of reproducing a sensation remarkably similar to the “aura” Benjamin
links with the cult/ritualistic practice of viewing a socially valued work of art within
a museum. Of course, Benjamin could never have anticipated a film like Grindhouse,
although he almost certainly would have viewed the rampant application of digital technologies as bringing his “expectations of cinema [. . .] to fruition,” especially
given the ease with which digital technologies lend themselves to an aesthetics of
“variability, manipulability [sic], dispersion, excess and hybridity” that ultimately
imperils notions of “authenticity” and, quite possibly, “auteurity’ (Daly, para. 1–3).3
Rodriguez’s and Tarantino’s invocation of a grindhouse “aura,” then, is one fraught
with ironic inversions and irreconcilable paradoxes. By attempting to evoke the
particularities of a temporally and spatially specific mode of “viewing” through the
application of digital technology, Grindhouse gestures toward reestablishing the
very “parasitical dependence on ritual” from which Benjamin suggested that motion
pictures were freed. In other words, through the deliberate application of digital
effects, Rodriguez and Tarantino fashion a self-reflective exercise in postmodern
nostalgia that alludes to an always already illusory “authenticity.” In the process, they
ironically invest a carefully orchestrated and executed “state-of-the-art” multiplex
event—like Grindhouse’s creation, distribution, and exhibition—with a pretense

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toward a simulated “authenticity” that speaks volumes about the “state of the arts” in
contemporary culture.
Furthermore, while Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino may imagine
themselves as directors working within the “grindhouse tradition,” such a stance is
far from tenable. Rodriguez and Tarantino are, after all, A-list Hollywood directors
with budgets that dwarf those granted to the directors of the very exploitation films
from which they draw much of their inspiration. As Maximilian Le Cain remarks in
his essay, “Tarantino and the Vengeful Ghosts of the Cinema”:
Tarantino might freely use such expressions as “grindhouse” in de-scribing his
work, but he does so from within the safety of the mainstream, never exposing himself to the real dangers and messy pleasures of the B-film. His take on
genre since Pulp Fiction is more like a theme park ride version of “grindhouse”
than the real item, a place where actors can flirt with carefully packaged
disreputability and come away looking and feeling hip while actually risking
nothing. After all, how can a B-movie shoulder the responsibility of being a
major pop-culture event, which is what is demanded of poor Tarantino every
time out? (para. 9)
Despite the visual and auditory markers linking Grindhouse’s content with
several popular exploitation film genres, the economics informing the Grindhouse’s
production and distribution necessarily condition the way spectators receive and
understand the film. While the affection Rodriguez and Tarantino feel for exploitation cinema is palpable in virtually every one of Grindhouse’s seemingly rickety
frames, their film ultimately straddles the line between the aesthetics of the “small”
yet “ferocious” works that it glosses and the ramifications of Grindhouse’s status as “a
bloated self-important ‘event’” (para. 9). What’s more, their self-professed “film geek”
posturing locates Grindhouse as, paradoxically, a big-budget exploitation film about
low-budget exploitation films that deploys high-end digital technologies to (re)create a low-tech analogue experience to which only a fraction of their audience may
be able to relate first-hand.4
This, however, is not to suggest that Grindhouse is incapable of impacting audiences in a visceral manner akin to that of the grittiest exploitation fare. Indeed, in its
depictions of extreme graphic violence, Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to Grindhouse, functions as a particularly “magnificient and perilous weapon”
(Buñuel 47) that may be wielded for the purposes of cultural critique. Thus,
Grindhouse simultaneously challenges its viewers to consider the social and political ramifications of the very acts of corporeal trauma they so readily (and eagerly)
consume.

“I’m A f r a i d Yo u’r e G o i n g to H av e to S ta rt G e tt i n g S c a r e d
Imm e d i at e ly”: E x p lo i t i n g/E x p lo d i n g V i o l e n c e i n D e at h P r o o f
Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s primary contribution to Grindhouse, is divided
into two “parts,” each focusing upon a group of beautiful women whose lives are permanently altered when they encounter, and are subsequently stalked by, a psychopathic daredevil named Stuntman Mike. In the first “part,” an Austin, Texas, radio
personality named Jungle Julia gathers her friends Shanna and Arlene for a night
out at a local bar. While drinking with a group of randy men, they meet a “dirty
hippy” named Pam, who, desperate for a lift home, agrees to ride in the make-shift
passenger seat of the mysterious Stuntman Mike’s allegedly indestructible/”death
proof ” racing car, a battered black vehicle with a menacing white skull painted on
the hood. Pam’s decision proves fatal, as Stuntman Mike sadistically careens his
car down the dark Texas roadways before plowing head-on into the car carrying
Jungle Julia, Shanna, and Arlene, killing them on contact. Only Stuntman Mike
survives. Then, following a short but fruitless inquest by the town sheriff, the film’s
“second part” begins, set, as we learn from a title card, some fourteen months later
in Lebanon, Tennessee. This time we follow the actions of a group of thrill-seeking
actresses/stuntwomen—Lee, Abernathy, Kim, and Zoë, the latter of whom nearly
meets her demise when, while fulfilling a personal fantasy by riding on the hood of
a speeding 1970 Dodge Challenger, she is almost turned into human road kill by a
marauding Stuntman Mike in a “death proof ” 1969 Dodge Charger. The psychopathic daredevil soon learns that he has selected the wrong target for his bloodlust.
The Charger’s occupants prove to be every bit as violent as Stuntman Mike, ultimately destroying his “death proof ” car and reducing him to a begging, bleeding
pulp on the side of the road.
Graphic violence has been a staple of Quentin Tarantino’s cinema since his
debut feature, Reservoir Dogs (1992). Even the scripts Tarantino penned before
establishing himself as a bankable commodity in Hollywood contain scenarios
brimming with brutality; True Romance (1993), directed by Tony Scott, culminates
with an epic shoot-out inspired by John Woo’s spectacular Hong Kong “bullet ballets.” Similarly, Natural Born Killers (1994), albeit substantially reimagined by writer
David Veloz and director Oliver Stone, garnered notoriety for its profoundly violent premise. Like the pair of Kill Bill films he directed prior to his contribution to
Grindhouse, Death Proof can be understood as an extensive homage to the numerous
exploitation genres that have long informed his own cinematic output. However,
to limit our comprehension of Tarantino’s intentions to a simple exercise in imitation or rib-nudging pastiche would be to ignore that beneath the carnage and gore
bracketed by his trademark logorrheic sparring exists a markedly, if only ultimately

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partially effective, critical intertextual dialogue. If the satirical trailers and abbreviated features that comprise the vast majority of Grindhouse’s 190-minute running
time offer audiences a veritable carnival of gore and mayhem, then might not the
final roadside attraction that brings the film to a close offer, if not an outright corrective, then—at the very least—a frozen moment (via freeze frame no less) during
which we might be asked to contemplate the ramifications of our own voyeuristic
complicity.
To analyze more effectively the meta-cinematic critique Tarantino’s narrative
poses, it is first necessary to consider how violence is apportioned throughout Death
Proof’s diegesis. In The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror, Terry
Heller claims the human perception of art differs according to how thoroughly one
acknowledges the work of art as a representation of what we imagine to be a potentially “real” person, location, or object. In works of horror, Heller proposes, this distance is crucial. Building off of Edward Bullough’s formulation of the principle of
aesthetic distance, Heller notes that it “seems to be in the nature of the tale of terror
to threaten aesthetic distance” (8). For a work of cinematic or literary horror to succeed in terrifying those who encounter it, the spectator must find herself vacillating
between an acknowledgment of the action’s literal plausibility and its implausibility,
between the work’s evocation of the “real” world and the spectator’s acknowledgment of the text’s artificiality. Successful horror films, in other words, threaten—
if only momentarily—the buffer zones spectators erect between the possible and
the impossible. Consequently, for Heller, the most effective tales of terror collapse
aesthetic distance, causing the utmost decrease in aesthetic distance without its
disappearance.
In Death Proof, Tarantino foregrounds this spectatorial process in several
important ways. In its collision of two popular exploitation film genres—namely,
the race-car and stalker film—Death Proof trumpets its grindhouse lineage while
also tapping into contemporary “media-fashioned fad(s)” like “road rage” (Brottman xv). Moreover, in his occupation as a professional daredevil, Stuntman Mike
provides a telling commentary on that “most symbolic construction of capitalism”
(Brottman and Sharrett 207), the quasi-aristocratic formulation known as celebrity
or, as Benjamin would articulate it, “the cult of the movie star” (231). By adopting his
profession as a part of his name, Stuntman Mike obliterates the distinction between
who he is and what he does. His identity is his social function within the late capitalist marketplace, thus rendering him as fully reified within a culture of consumption and exploitation. That no one he meets has ever heard of the stars, films, or
television programs for whom he has provided his services as a stunt double further
elucidates not only the creation of an artificial nostalgia upon which Grindhouse is
predicated, but also evidences the collapse of human identity with use value. This
phenomenon is further illustrated by the names that the film’s characters use to

mock Stuntman Mike’s appearance (e.g., “BJ [sans ‘The Bear’], “Stroker Ace,” and,
perhaps most appropriately, “Icy Hot”—the name of the muscle ointment advertised on the back of his jacket).
This deliberate construction of nostalgia in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is
not just apparent through the digital manipulation of sound and image to (re)create
a historically and geographically specific viewing experience, but also manifests itself
during sequences in which Tarantino deploys strategic anachronisms to position
the film’s action within a temporally ambiguous “present.” Whereas minuscule cell
phones, references to contemporary alcoholic beverages, and a conspicuous litany
of contemporary pop-culture references seemingly ground the narrative’s action as
transpiring during the late twentieth to early twenty-first century, jukeboxes filled
with vinyl 45s and parking lots packed with thirty-year-old sports cars and sedans
confound these temporal markers. Deliberate anachronisms have long been a hallmark of postmodern literature and film, and it is an aesthetic device Tarantino has
frequently used. This collapse of space and time is likewise a cinematic maneuver
about which much has been written in recent years. In her essay, “Cinema and the
Postmodern Condition,” for example, Anne Friedberg writes that “the disappearance of a sense of history, entrapment in a perpetual present,” and the eradication
of stable “temporal referents” (61) permeates the contemporary cinematic landscape.
Thinking along similar lines, the cultural theorist David Harvey posits this aesthetic
and narratological practice as indicative of larger paradigmatic shifts in a historical
moment increasingly dominated by fluid economies: “The experience of time-space
compression in recent years, under the pressures of the turn to more flexible modes
of accumulation, has generated a crisis of representation in cultural forms, and [. . .]
this is a subject of intense aesthetic concern, either in toto [. . .] or in part” (322).
While Death Proof’s temporal compression both reflects larger sociocultural
logics and constitutes a nostalgic acknowledgment of Tarantino’s stylistic forebears,
its conflation of historical markers allows for the creation of “new ways of thinking
and feeling” (322). This freedom from absolute temporal specificity permits Tarantino to explore the politics of filmic violence within the context of exploitation film
genres and, more expansively, cinema itself. In this sense, the scenes of graphic violence that provide grisly climaxes to each of the film’s “parts” emerge as indicative of
Tarantino’s complex critique of the aesthetics and implications of film violence.
The depiction of the spectacular head-on collision that brings the primary narrative drive of Death Proof’s first half to a crashing halt hinges upon a combination
of sophisticated special effects and complex editing that paradoxically renders the
events at once realistic, engaging the audience’s sensibilities in a gut-wrenchingly
visceral level, and blatantly artificial in that the entire episode is obviously rendered
via access to technologies far in excess of anything available to exploitation filmmakers of the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, the entire event is telegraphed by Stuntman

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Mike’s direct address to the camera; his impish smile and knowing, conspiratorial
wink not only leads the film’s viewers to acknowledge their complicity as willing
spectators, but also signals a crucial shift in form and tone. As if on Stuntman Mike’s
cue, Death Proof veers sharply from scenes of playful verbal sparring and clichéd
innuendo to the gruesome genre-specific tropes the audience has been waiting to
see since Death Proof’s opening frames. To borrow the discourse of pornography,
a body genre that, like horror cinema, builds steadily, and conspicuously, toward a
predictable, and often overtly spectacular, “climax,” Stuntman Mike’s wink marks the
moment in which Death Proof’s initial foreplay shifts toward the violent collisions—
the “big bang,” so to speak—that viewers came to see in the first place. In this sense,
Tarantino fetishizes the violent high-speed crash that forms the film’s literal and
figurative centerpiece, locating the catastrophic action to follow as blatant artifice
orchestrated for our consumption.
As well as purposefully delaying this moment of visual gratification, Tarantino depicts this graphic high-speed vehicular homicide—a mass murder seemingly
motivated, at least in part, by masculinist aggression evoked in response to emasculating discourse (“I’m not going to fuck him,” Pam [the “dirty hippy”] informs Jungle
Julia, Shanna, and Arlene. “He’s old enough to be my father”)—from five different
angles and through the lenses of cameras located within and outside of the crashing
cars. Consequently, the carnage gestures toward a kind of realism, in that spectators
witness each girl’s death in graphic slow motion (a leg, propped up on the passenger door’s open window is brutally amputated; a spinning tire smashes through
the windshield of the girls’ car before rolling over a rear passenger’s face), while
maintaining the status of an obviously staged occurrence. By portraying this horrific event in an obviously “self-conscious and anti-illusionistic” manner, Tarantino
“destroys the effect—via effects” and positions Death Proof as a “specifically filmic”
work of art (Arnzen 180). Thus, the sequence dislocates its viewers from the spectacle’s immediacy and veracity, providing a critical distance that forces the spectator
to reevaluate her reaction to the events transpiring on the screen.
Likewise, the violent encounter that brings Death Proof to an abrupt close further complicates this critical relationship between the spectator and the action she
views. In keeping with horror film conventions, in which the homicidal stalker is
finally vanquished (barring a sequel, of course) by the film’s resourceful—usually
female—lead, Stuntman Mike meets his match in the form of a trio of daring stuntwomen. Here, too, the encounter is charged with language that pits Stuntman Mike’s
conspicuous misogyny against the female daredevils’ stereotypically masculine and
emasculating patois. For example, Kim, while ramming Stuntman Mike’s battered,
slowly disintegrating “death proof ” race car off of the road, refers to her aggressive
driving as “bust[ing] a nut up in this bitch” and “tapping [Stuntman Mike’s] ass.”
Similarly, as the psychopathic-stunt-driver-suddenly-turned-defenseless-pedestrian

begs for mercy on the side of the road, Kim savagely wrenches his obviously broken
arm, exacerbating an injury that operates as a visual signifier of the stuntman’s metaphorical impotence. As connoisseurs of exploitation films conforming to the slasher
and rape-revenge genres well know, such reversals of power are well-worn conventions. Furthermore, as revenge is a recurring trope in Tarantino’s oeuvre, from Reservoir Dogs’ double-crossed thieves to Kill Bill’s vengeful bride, it is not surprising that
his tribute to grindhouse cinema conforms to this formula. By depicting the stuntwomen’s violence as every bit as sadistic and gratuitous as the assault advanced by
their stalker turned prey, Tarantino ultimately lends Death Proof a more expansive
critical and meta-cinematic dimension.
After the stuntwomen drag Stuntman Mike from his car, battering him into
submission beneath a relentless barrage of vicious kicks and blows, Death Proof’s
credits roll, accompanied by a series of photos intended to represent some of the
women that Stuntman Mike has killed. Here, too, the audience is led to contemplate
the implications of the violence they have witnessed and, quite possibly, relished.
Tarantino’s decision to juxtapose the women’s attack upon Stuntman Mike’s now
helpless form with the photos of his victims begs viewers to understand Stuntman
Mike as both predator and prey. The once- malevolent aggressor is now, like the
women in the photos, a victim of violence. Thus, although the snapshots of Stuntman Mike’s victims may at first suggest that a kind of “justice” has “been served,” one
cannot discount the extent to which the stills conflate the representations of violence transpiring throughout Death Proof’s parallel narratives. In this sense, unlike
the phony trailers that open Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is far more
than simple self-reflexive parody. Nor is it a big-budget imitation of a small-budget
mode of filmmaking predicated upon “clearly defined oppositions” that “often can be
reduced to some version of white hat versus black hat” (Grant 15), as is the case with
Robert Rodriguez’s by-the-numbers zombie film, Planet Terror. Rather, it is a fusion
of homage and critique, a violent spectacle that ultimately interrogates the cultural
logics behind its spectacular brutality.

Co n c lu s i o n: Lo o k i n g F o r wa r d, G a z i n g B ac k
In a work populated by monsters both human and fantastical, the otherworldly
entity Grindhouse most readily—though by no means explicitly—evokes is Janus,
the dual-faced Roman god of transition, of endings begetting new beginnings.
Because Tarantino’s and Rodriguez’s application of cutting-edge digital technologies emulates not only a mode of low-budget genre filmmaking, but also the inevitable degradation of celluloid prints spooled repeatedly through the mechanical
entrails of countless projectors, Grindhouse engages one of the most-important and

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least-theorized nexus points in cinema history: the emergence of digital technologies within a motion picture industry long predicated upon analogue-based systems
of production and post-production/exhibition. At the very least, it provides one of
the finest examples of what Laura Mulvey recognizes as a vital paradox in cinema at
the dawn of the art form’s second century: specifically, that “new [digital] technologies are able to reveal the beauty of the cinema through a displacement that breaks
the bonds of specificity so important to [. . .] filmmakers and theorists of previous
generations” (135). Transformations within aesthetic traditions require serious and
thoughtful reengagements with theories of spectatorship and economies of signification—what Mulvey refers to as the “significance” of “the indexical sign” (134). As a
meta-filmic experiment with such concerns at its core, Grindhouse provides scholars
with a fertile terrain from which to launch future explorations of the ways in which
digital technology’s burgeoning potential intersects with celluloid’s waning aesthetic
and material possibilities.

N ot e s
1. See Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and Halloween (2007), as well as Alexandre
Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and The Hills Have Eyes II (2007). In each of these films, digital
technologies are used to emulate the “look” and “feel” of worn celluloid.
2. Walter Benjamin’s contention that film’s reproducibility necessarily leads to the dissipation
of the “aura” associated with painting, sculpture, and theater has by no means gone uncontested
in cinema studies; see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt
(New York: Schocken Books, 1988). In Film in the Aura of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1986), for instance, Dudley Andrew suggests that the mechanically reproduced
aura remains when/because the spectator invests it with a meaning and value. Thus, Andrew
posits, films, “readings of them, and theories about both are historical events in culture” (xiii).
Moreover, Andrew claims, Benjamin’s aura endures in the so-called art film because spectators
who are drawn to such works attend them “with certain ambitious expectations . . . reinforcing
values” (195).
3. According to Daly, Quentin Tarantino’s original inclination during the Grindhouse’s
planning stages was to “shoot on aged film.” It was the “more technically savvy Rodriguez” who
convinced Tarantino to shoot on the best film stock and then create the “well-loved grindhouse”
look during post-production. In other words, the “well-loved” scratches and missing frames “could
be recreated digitally without the need for love. Love as plug in”; Kristen Daly, “The Dissipating
Aura of Cinema,” Transformations 15 (November 2007), para. 5.
4. In The 2nd Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2000), Wheeler Winston Dixon recognizes “topicality” as a vital
component of exploitation cinema. In order for low-budget genre cinema to lure audience’s,
Dixon argues, they had to “cater to fads” and “deliver what an audience want[ed] to see right now,
in order to take advantage of the public’s interest” (79). Thus, according to Dixon, exploitation
films “perpetually ride the crest of the wave of public taste” (79). In this sense, despite its large
budget and blockbuster pretensions, Grindhouse’s production of nostalgia for the sake of financial

gain can be understood as the ideal cinematic work for the postmodern age in which, as Fredric
Jameson notes in his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Raleigh, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1991), popular notions of history are “flattened” and a people reminisce
over the present.

A f t e r wo r d
Memory, Genre, and Self-Narrativization; Or,
Why I Should Be a More Content Horror Fan
—David Church

As a child inexplicably drawn to the morbid and macabre, I recall a time when the
Universal horror classics were just no longer enough, but I was forbidden from
watching R-rated films—thus banning the “bad” horror that intrigued me all the
more through its prohibition. For sleepovers at a friend’s house, my comrades and
I routinely trekked down to “Family Video,” the local small-town video store, and
perused the “Horror” section located just adjacent to the flimsy wooden screen hiding the store’s porn offerings from common view. Being a semi-dutiful child, I followed my parents’ strictures and intentionally opted for renting those horror flicks
that were technically “unrated,” shielding myself from self-incrimination with a convenient half-truth that often exposed me to far more violent films than the R-rated
alternatives.
From my own skeptical position toward American horror today, however, even
this small memory seems quaint when viewed through a more mature awareness
of studios’ current marketing tactics; the word “unrated” no longer appears in the
small print on the back of video boxes, but is typically splayed across DVD covers
in dripping red letters, suggesting that this viewing experience will offer something
markedly different from the theatrical release. And the films that I surreptitiously
viewed as a child—Maniac (1980), The Evil Dead (1982), Silent Night, Deadly Night
(1984)—those early artifacts of the VHS age are now the stuff of seemingly endless
remakes, rip-offs, sequels, and throwbacks as the genre lumbers on indefinitely like
a zombie with an intact brainstem . . . or so goes the lament.
Of course, as a genre very much driven by profit margins, modern horror has
always been prone to such incestuous tendencies, so much so that it can be difficult
to distinguish innovations from repetitions—a rhizomatic map would better fit the
genre than a straightforward model of evolution. But isn’t that precisely part of the
genre’s charm (and frustration) for those of us with more than a purely academic
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interest in its intricacies? Although our own engagement with horror films may
develop in a linear fashion across our lifetimes, the genre itself seldom follows any
such teleology, often to the consternation of fans. One might, for example, deride
Cloverfield (2008) as a big-budget descendent of Gojira (1954), and of Cannibal
Holocaust (1980), by way of The Blair Witch Project (1999), yoking together the
mockumentary format with the spectacle of a giant monster undertaking urban
destruction, but such sentiment does a disservice to the relative value and historical
specificity of each film. Because cinematic horror (especially that produced since
the mid-twentieth century) is primarily directed toward a youth market, we may
spend time gaining (sub-)cultural capital surrounding the genre, only to eventually
find ourselves distanced in age and (sub-)cultural competence from the audience
currently being catered to—hence the tendency to distrust current trends and seek
refuge in nostalgia.
Even if they are separated by only a few years, there is often a cultural divide
between “seasoned” fans (and scholar-fans aiming for legitimacy in the academy)
who will happily recite the virtues (and the scholarly appraisals) of canonical works
like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), and teen
viewers whose limited experience with those films comes through their contemporary iterations. But we can hardly blame audiences themselves; much as 1930s
horror failed to frighten me after a certain age, so do 1970s and 1980s horror films
apparently fail to unnerve today’s teen viewers accustomed to the quicker editing,
higher production values, slicker special effects, and more attractive casts endemic
to Hollywood cinema in general. Meanwhile, horror aficionados often struggle for
a sense of cultural distinction by retreating into genre currents—independent horror, foreign horror cinemas, historically marginalized horror trends—seemingly less
penetrated by “mainstream” consumerism, disavowing the fact that most of these
“other” films were likewise made to maximize potential profits.1
These comments about the genre and its various audiences are broad strokes,
to be sure, but their broadness points to the dilemma addressed in the introduction
to this book: how does one interpret recent generic threads without the requisite
historical distance for narrativizing them (and, in so doing, ignoring some of their
complexity)? How can we speculate about whichever trends will bubble up next
without the larger perspective in which to locate current ones? In our attempts to
understand the present, we often seem compelled to draw upon the rosiest of personal and cultural memories (as in the brief personal recollection I opened with)—
anything to insert artificial chunks of distance between our contemporary selves
and some romanticized past when we were perhaps more easily frightened, when
the genre still seemed (to us, at least) fresh and new. In conjunction with these
autobiographical narratives, we traditionally try to historicize the genre as a linear
continuity between individual or clustered texts—much like classical Hollywood

narrative continuity attempts to conceal the unavoidable seams and potentially
estranging moments that would otherwise threaten any sense of monolithic unity.
And yet we should increasingly resist that discursive urge. Magnifying the many
fractures and slippages between disparate historical moments, which are productive of unexpected generic tangents and hybrids, is a way of destabilizing notions of
generic continuity and interpreting films on their own terms, becoming a task less
intimately entangled with the (sub-)cultural valuations of “authenticity” and “originality” that often infect horror fans (and arguably, scholars too) with nostalgia for
perhaps a less complex, cynical time in their own lives.
It is too easy, for instance, to reject much of recent American horror (and, by
extension, its audiences) by stacking it up against fans’ and scholars’ longtime investments in the genre’s “progressive” thread of the 1970s—a thread that only really
lingers within a few seminal films—and conveniently neglecting the larger share
of “undistinguished” horror films produced during that same period. Meanwhile,
some of those neglected films have been reanimated in recent years as “paracinema”
and the recent trend in neo-exploitation or “grindhouse chic,” providing a refuge for
disgruntled horror fans with subcultural capital to burn. In the same vein, the mediocre horror of today may become ironically celebrated as the camp of tomorrow,
serving the specific interests of genre devotees. Likewise, in any period, there will be
a handful of films pushing the envelope of “good taste” in terms of violence; the controversy surrounding the current trend in “torture porn” is little different from that
surrounding Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films during the mid-1960s, for example.2
And peering from another angle, the optimist in us may overreach, prematurely
reading historical significance into certain texts against our better judgment; one
might, for example, strategically ignore the blatant homophobia and xenophobia
of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) in the interest of reading it as a symptomatic post-9/11
horror film—only to have one’s worst suspicions confirmed by its sequel.
In any case, it would be difficult to speculate with any degree of confidence
about future directions for American horror cinema without falling back upon
all-too-familiar discourses about the sameness between texts—at the expense of
those smaller, potentially transformative differences that are often subsumed by
a historicizing sense of generic continuity. For genre observers, the “return of the
repressed” may not just involve the eruption of specific cultural fears at any given
historical moment, but also the uncanny reappearance of once-passé horror trends
themselves, threatening the tidy chronological categorizations we have previously
made for them. Recent years have seen the apparent wax and wane of Asian horror remakes, “torture porn,” 1970s and 1980s horror remakes, supernatural horror,
zombie films, horror mockumentaries, neo-exploitation, and so on—though these
may reappear sooner than expected, not as mere atavisms of continuing historical
anxieties, but as temporal ruptures opening toward a multiplicity of diverse generic

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possibilities. At the time of this writing, for example, the residual effects upon
American horror of a national trauma like 9/11 have yet to be adequately explained,
but its aftershocks may reverberate within the genre for years to come. It is impossible to tell exactly what this will look like, though I strongly suspect that it will not
occur in directly causal ways suggesting a linear generic evolution, but rather by
chaotically sowing the seeds that may spawn or revive generic tangents or anomalies which today might seem largely irrelevant to our current cultural unconscious.
Unlike the monstrously exaggerated sense of trauma constructed by more culturally
“acceptable” media sources through endless video loops of collapsing buildings and
barely veiled expressions of jingoism, the horror genre seems only capable of passively registering the pain. In recent horror films, the very absence of more telling
clues about the American mentality in the post-9/11 period is itself perhaps indicative of the extent of the trauma.3
Yet, we might also question whether it is even historically valid to claim a select
few films as symptomatic of the supposed zeitgeist in any given period—especially
when such selections are often based more upon retrospective and highly personal
assessments of “quality” than actual audience response to said films. Case in point: if
I—unable to fully extricate myself from “within” the discourses of generic continuity structuring my performed self-identity as a fan—attempt to predict anything
about the array of tendrils sent out by the American horror film in coming years, I
often find myself chasing my own tail, narrativizing the genre in linear ways despite
my best efforts to the contrary. As an extended example, I might posit that our
conception of the genre in this post-Scream (1996) era will remain chiefly haunted
by the specter of irony, which has survived more or less unscathed the hasty declarations of its demise in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Irony is certainly nothing
new in the horror film—a genre in which viewers may already seek distance (ironic
or otherwise) from particularly shocking or ludicrous images—but the locus of
irony has increasingly shifted in recent years from audience reception to the texts
themselves. When horrified (adult) critics of early-1980s slasher films wrote about
teen audiences laughing and cheering at the dismemberment of their on-screen surrogates, they apparently overlooked the possibility of teens’ ironic responses to the
very excessiveness of those films’ conservative ideologies. Viewed at an age when
their parents often attempt to instill the mantras of discipline, young audiences
already familiar with the so-called subgeneric “rules” of slasher films (drugs, sex,
bad behavior = gory death)—“rules” which may actually exist in far fewer films
than prevalent stereotype of the subgenre suggests—can mock the ridiculousness
of these “fatal,” parental-revenge fantasies, making the thrill of horror spectatorship
seem all the more “transgressive.” Later films like Scream, however, seem to prepackage that irony as a preferred reading, wresting it away from the avid horror viewers
who grew up during the heyday of slasher films (and who might assume themselves

older and wiser than most teen audiences today)—effectively transplanting irony
from the films’ external reception to a central position within the text itself, hence
the backlash from many horror fans threatened by their subcultural competences
being spread thinly across the wider viewing public.
Though slasher films often originated as mainstream Hollywood products
(despite their wide disrepute, which has frequently rendered them niche objects
today),4 Scream’s self-reflexive parody allegedly mainstreamed the subgenre in a way
that many horror fans forgave of neo-exploitation pastiches like The Devil’s Rejects
(2005) and Grindhouse (2007). Where Scream and its sequels disparage the conventions of 1980s slasher films (even as they ironically play by those same rules), the
recent wave of “grindhouse chic” blatantly celebrates the pleasures of 1970s sleaze,
often through aggressively ironic appeals to political incorrectness aimed primarily
at male horror buffs. Though their respective tones and intended audiences may
somewhat differ, we might see the prepackaged textual uses of irony in both cycles as
roughly comparable, each alternating between tongue-in-cheek intertextuality and
straight-faced brutality. With these films intentionally playing to viewers’ (sub-)cultural competences, horror audiences may increasingly negotiate their own distanced
responses in highly contingent ways, depending on how they wish to perform a
sense of subcultural “authenticity” through accepting or rejecting certain elements
of the films’ ironic modes of address. For example, in conversation with avid horror
devotees about House of 1000 Corpses (2003), one might play “spot the semi-obscure
intertextual references” for subcultural one-upmanship, or privilege the film’s hallucinatory, down-the-rabbit-hole tone through comparisons to the disjointedness
of low-budget exploitation films; however, when talking with supposedly less “seasoned” viewers, one might declare the film a “sell out” for “exploiting” exploitation
(if such a thing can be said without, dare I say, a trace of irony), or criticize as too
“mainstream” the same music-video-style editing and garish mise-en-scène that help
create the film’s disorienting effects.
My point here is that such situational contortions—which should also be
growing readily visible in the tortured logic of this pseudo-fannish scribble—can
be as much inspired by our personal self-histories as the misleadingly linear conceptions of generic history we are inclined to interpret. As younger generations of
horror viewers grow older and move into increased positions of sociocultural capital
(e.g., as tastemakers or even as fans-turned-filmmakers, such as Kevin Williamson or Quentin Tarantino), they may look back toward horror’s cherished place
within a pop-culture wasteland tenuously associated with romanticized memories
of youth. These ironic-cum-nostalgic celebrations of horror’s past may partially
account for the cyclical trends in recent American horror—from revisionist takes
on the 1980s slasher cycle (which was never as formulaic as films like Scream would
like us to recall) to slumming through fetishized cultural memories of a thriving

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1970s grindhouse scene (with which few contemporary viewers had actual contact).
But however appropriate I find it to cite Scream and Grindhouse as bookends for
recent American horror, that choice also unduly narrativizes the genre, stressing
broad similarities between rather disparate texts according to qualitative criteria
springing from my own taste for certain horror varieties. My broad interpretation
assumes (correctly or not) that the slasher film, and the exploitation aesthetic in
general, still casts a long shadow over our current conception of American horror—
a shadow that temporally overlaps with my personal history as a twenty-something
horror fan—so that I tend to neglect other subgenres less inflected with ironic or
exploitative connotations, to say nothing of anomalous films that belie any stable
sense of generic continuity.
Because the horror genre fuels the (sub-)cultural competences that we acquire
over time to legitimize our interests in it, we may interpret its history as a linear narrative so that it conforms to our own linear conceptions of identity; in other words,
feeling our remembered personal histories structured by the genre, we can justify
those histories by projecting them back onto the genre. As a discursive entity, the
genre is partially constructed by our subjectivities, just as the genre itself partially
constructs our subjectivities—hence our ever-threatened desire to make chronological sense of the genre based on concepts like “authenticity” and “originality” that we
would like to see ourselves performing as individuals or fans or scholars. Challenging generic continuity by treating horror texts as historically specific fragments can
likewise threaten to fragment the sense of self constructed through our academic
knowledge of genre history or our techniques of subcultural belonging. Of course,
we cannot step outside discourse, but perhaps we can work to modify it by resorting less to habitual experiences of pastness, and instead increasingly amplify those
moments of difference within and between texts: those oft-fleeting cracks in historical or narratological coherence, which we may only instinctively perceive, but which
radiate potentiality in non-linear directions across (and against) time.5 In focusing
on how horror is always in a process of becoming other than its current incarnation—with repetition understood less as stagnation than as the eternal return of
difference—we can examine how its texts work uniquely in each historical moment,
without fetishizing generic continuity as a primary source of symptomatic readings
or standards of value.
More than one director has called horror a forgiving genre: give audiences some
guts and scares, and they’ll forgive some rough edges along the way. Though we, as
scholars and fans, may hope to demand a bit more than that from the films we love,
just as we demand much of ourselves, we might as well learn to be similarly forgiving
of the genre and its seeming discontents—especially the ones that stare back at us
as we stare into the cracked mirror of horror. Recognizing our own embeddedness
in self-narratives need not erase our compulsive desire to construct them; rather,

in gaining a critical awareness of the “generic” patterns that we re-present to (and
about) ourselves, we might pleasurably mutate our self-conceptions in creative ways
by embracing the fluidity of those numerous historical moments through which our
identities are constantly re-formed. If we expect the horror genre to keep revitalizing itself with fresh pulses of creativity, even when current demands for “authenticity” and “originality” remain dubious at best, we should not neglect a corresponding
aesthetic in our ongoing projects of piecing together those multiplicitous fragments
that, for better or worse, make us who we are.
Another small memory now: in those first few months after the Twin Towers fell, I found myself an incoming college freshman, moving away from the comforts of home and out into what seemed a rapidly changing world. During that
time, I first saw Donnie Darko (2001), a horror/sci-fi/teen-romance hybrid that
has since become inseparable from my personal recollections of those strange days.
Although filmed at least a year before 9/11 and set in 1988, the time-bending story
of a young man’s impending personal apocalypse felt especially prescient at the time.
Re-watching the film today is itself an exercise in time travel for me. Its evocation
of free-floating teenage angst is tempered by an equally ironic and nostalgic sincerity linked to its many intertextual references to 1980s music and cinema. It is this
overarching sense of tension that always reminds me of the emotional numbness I
forced upon myself as a defense against the ceaseless post-9/11 media barrage. In a
particularly memorable scene in a near-deserted movie theater, a temporal portal
opens in a screen showing The Evil Dead—one of the beloved horror films from
my childhood—while Donnie receives an ominous premonition, his love interest
sleeping peacefully beside him all the while. In contrast to much 1980s revivalism of
recent years, the Evil Dead reference here seems neither cloyingly ironic nor mocking
in spirit; instead, it resonates with my own fond memories of the genre. By using the
horror film as a potential site of wistful emotion, not just a source of fear or humor,
Donnie Darko momentarily pierced the strong cynicism that partially comprised my
self-identity in the immediate post-9/11 moment. In fragmenting and rearranging
horror’s generic conventions, collapsing the temporal and generic distance between
these two very different films, a relative anomaly like Donnie Darko has come to
movingly embody the liminal space I experienced during that brief but violent rupturing of national and personal narratives. Recent American horror films may mean
many things to many people, but perhaps these films might hold overlooked potential for personal and cultural memory to encourage productive transformations, if
only as a way of reconciling within ourselves our fraught relationship with the genre
we love.

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N ot e s
1. See Mark Jancovich, “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital, and the Production
of Cultural Distinctions,” Cultural Studies 16.2 (2002): 306–22.
2. Perhaps it is little coincidence that several of Lewis’s films have also been remade in recent
years, including 2001 Maniacs (2005) and The Wizard of Gore (2007).
3. The frequent conflation of absence and loss in trauma is examined at length in Dominick
LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),
43–85.
4. See Matt Hills, “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and
Legitimate Film Cultures,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed.
Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 219–39.
5. In the spirit of speculation, my cues here are vaguely inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and
by Robert B. Ray’s use of the Surrealist strategy of “irrational enlargement” upon those strange
and unexplained details in Hollywood films that inadvertently inspire reflection upon the
multiplicity of creative possibilities that are commonly subsumed by traditional narrative choices
and generic constraints. See Robert B. Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 64–68.

Craig Bernardini is assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College,
City University of New York, holding a B.A. in the Writing Seminars from The
Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Utah. In the summer of 1990 he interned at Fangoria magazine, and has
continued to study, write about, and write stories in the horror genre ever since. In
addition to horror cinema, his research interests include popular music and American literature. His most recent work, “Heavy Melville,” analyzes how issues of gender and aesthetics affected the reception of Leviathan, a heavy-metal album inspired
by Moby-Dick. He is also researching and writing about the image of the frontier
in Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Cormac
McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
David Church is a Ph.D. student in Communication and Culture at Indiana University. He is currently editing Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin. He
has contributed to Disability Studies Quarterly, Film Quarterly, The Encyclopedia of
American Disability History, Offscreen, and Senses of Cinema.
Pamela Craig is a research candidate in the Institute of Film and Television Studies
at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her current research project focuses on cinematic representations of Christmas and Halloween in the United States and their
relationship to the Gothic mode.
Blair Davis holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at
McGill University in Montreal. He has been an instructor in film studies at the
School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University since 2003. His
essays are featured in Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945, Horror
Film: Creating and Marketing Fear, and Reel Food: Essays on Film and Food, as well
as in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television.
Martin Fradley teaches American Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.
His published work has appeared in Yvonne Tasker’s edited collections Fifty
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Contemporary Filmmakers and Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Ginette
Vincendeau and Alastair Philips; Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood;
and Falling in Love Again: The Contemporary Romantic Comedy, edited by Stacey
Abbot and Deborah Jeremyn.
Steffen Hantke has published essays and reviews on contemporary literature, film,
and culture in Paradoxa, College Literature, The Journal of Popular Culture, Post Script,
Kinema, Scope, Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Studies in Twentieth and TwentyFirst Century Literature, and other journals, as well as in anthologies in Germany
and the United States. He is author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary
Literature, as well as editor of Horror, a special topics issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear, Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after
1945, and, together with Rudolphus Teeuwen, Gypsy Scholars, Migrant Teachers, and
the Global Academic Proletariat: Adjunct Labor in Higher Education. He serves on
the editorial boards of Paradoxa and The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance. Since 1999, he has also been chair of the “Horror” area at the Southwest/
Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association. He currently teaches at
Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, as Associate Professor in the American
Culture Program.
Reynold Humphries has published Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His
American Films, The American Horror Film: An Introduction, and The Hollywood
Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape. He has written on European
horror (Argento, Bava, and Franju) for the Web site Kinoeye, on early Mario Bava
for both Monstrous Adaptations and 100 European Horror Films, and has contributed
to the special horror issue of Paradoxa, the issue of Post Script devoted to serial killers, 101 Horror Movies, 101 Sci-Fi Movies, and The Cinema of Tod Browning: Essays
of the Macabre and Grotesque. A study (in French) of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre and its sequel appeared in Cauchemars Américains: Fantastique
et horreur dans le cinéma moderne, and a forthcoming French anthology devoted to
George A. Romero includes chapters by him on The Crazies and Dawn of the Dead.
His work in other fields includes contributions to Film Noir Reader 4, Gangster
Film Reader, Docufictions, Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy, 501 Movie
Directors, and Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row. His latest book is Hollywood’s
Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History.
James Kendrick holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Communication and
Culture. He is an assistant professor in the Film and Digital Media division of the
Department of Communication Studies at Baylor University, where he teaches
classes on film theory/aesthetics, the history of motion pictures, the history of radio

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and television, and media and society. He has published several book chapters, as
well as articles and reviews in such publications as The Velvet Light Trap, The Journal
of Film and Video, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film-Philosophy, Kinoeye, and The Moving Image. In addition to his academic work, he is also the film and
DVD critic for the Web site Qnetwork.com, where he has written more than 1,500
film reviews. He is currently working on two books about film violence.
Christina Klein is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College and author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. She is currently writing a book about the effects of globalization on
U.S. and Asian film industries. Her articles on contemporary Asian cinema have
been published in Cinema Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Comparative American Studies, American Quarterly, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald
Tribune.
Ben Kooyman is a doctoral candidate and part-time teacher at Flinders University,
Australia. His Ph.D. thesis explores how filmmakers attempt to genealogize themselves within Shakespeare’s legacy through adapting the Bard’s plays to film, and how
these self-fashioning gestures are built upon ideological contradictions and repressions which can be elucidated through applying theoretical concepts from the work
of Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Textual analyses run the gamut
from Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood to Lloyd Kaufman’s Tromeo and Juliet. Kooyman is
also a longtime horror-movie and comic-book aficionado. He is the creator, writer,
and illustrator of the underground comic-book series Hamlet VS. Faustus. His most
recent scholarly publication was “‘Back in the Bloody Smoke’—Dark Fantasy, Dark
Reality: London in the Comic Books V for Vendetta and Hellblazer” in London Was
Full of Rooms, edited by Barnett et al.
Jay McRoy is associate professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University
of Wisconsin at Parkside. He is the editor of Japanese Horror Cinema and coeditor
(with Richard Hand) of Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in
Horror Film. His monograph Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Film
is forthcoming.
Kial Natale is an award-winning filmmaker currently enrolled in Simon Fraser
University’s film production program. A past film teacher at the Flagstaff Arts and
Leadership Academy and member of the Dean’s Honour List for Northern Arizona
University and Simon Fraser University, his academic and critical focus is grounded
in the study of the horror genre. He is currently working on the scripts for two
feature-length horror films.

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Andrew Patrick Nelson is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Arts, Languages and
Literatures at the University of Exeter, where he is completing a dissertation on the
Western. His broader research interests are film genres, Hollywood cinema, and
American history.
Tony Perrello was born in Monroe, New York, and was educated at St. Bonaventure University, SUNY at Albany, and the University of South Carolina, where he
received a Ph.D. in 1998. He specialized in Renaissance literature and Shakespeare
and wrote a dissertation on the rise of the grotesque in Renaissance drama. He is
currently an assistant professor of English at California State University, Stanislaus,
where he teaches courses in British Renaissance and medieval literature and special topics courses such as Horror in Literature and Film. He has published several
essays on British literature in books and in academic journals such as English Language Notes and Postscript. These include a translation and explication of a previously undiscovered medieval riddle, an argument for an Anglo-Saxon source for the
Gloucester subplot in King Lear, and an analysis of the most recent film versions of
Othello and their racial implications in the classroom. A die-hard horror fan since
he was a child, Tony has recently taken a scholarly interest in the genre, and he
regularly chairs sessions in horror film at conferences such as the Rocky Mountain
MLA.
Philip L. Simpson received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Eastern Illinois University in 1986 and 1989, respectively, and his doctorate in American
Literature from Southern Illinois University in 1996. He serves as North Region
Vice Provost and Academic Dean of Humanities/Fine Arts and Behavioral/Social
Sciences at Brevard Community College in Florida. Before that, he was a professor
of Communications and Humanities at the Palm Bay campus of Brevard Community College for eight years and Department Chair of Liberal Arts for five years. He
also serves as President of the Popular Culture Association and Area Chair of Horror for the Association. He received the Association’s Felicia Campbell Area Chair
Award in 2006. He sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Culture. His
book, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film
and Fiction, was published in 2000, and he is the author of numerous other essays
on film, literature, popular culture, and horror.